


Night People (And How to Keep Them Warm)

by radiobread



Category: Neon Genesis Evangelion
Genre: Alcohol, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - College/University, Depression, M/M, Self Confidence Issues, Unrequited Crush, but then kaworu shows up so ey we good
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-08-28
Updated: 2018-01-28
Packaged: 2018-08-11 12:35:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 30,975
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7892521
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/radiobread/pseuds/radiobread
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>School is bad. Life is bad. Things are bad, and Shinji is okay with it because it's all that he's ever known. And then Kaworu comes. And then Kaworu goes.<br/>(A kind of dark college AU)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> so i found out the hard way that college is dark and difficult and not cute at all. I don't find that a lot of college au things depict that, no matter how lovely they are. Idk, i wrote this when I was listening to a lot of flatsound. So this is going to be...something? Good? Crap? Who knows. Let's see if this works, I guess?? (a.k.a a crappy college au that takes all of the fun parts away from canon)

**10:58 P.M**

The lights here are pretty. Shinji thinks to himself, for only a moment, that living isn’t such a chore.

That miracle happens on nights like this one. When the crowd of people he voluntarily surrounds himself with is large enough to make him feel like he isn’t totally socially inept. When there is enough life, and love, and conversation going on around him to let him pretend like he doesn’t exist for a few hours. Like he’s just some floating entity, or a guy stuck in a perpetual out of body experience who doesn’t have to hear himself breathe, or chew, or live. It’s sad. It’s  _ really _ fucking sad, but it  _ works _ for him. 

He can do parties. For one reason or another, Shinji can’t do dates. Can’t go out to lunch with more than four people without letting social exhaustion drive him out the bathroom window. Can’t look at that cute guy at the pharmacy for more than two seconds at a time. But Shinji, when blessed by these fuzzy pink lights, and the end of a glass of some toilet-y drug store wine, can do house parties.

Shinji even kind of  _ likes _ house parties.

It’s not school, and it’s not NERV. It’s a hazy pink limbo in between and he lets himself enjoy it. 

And Asuka? Asuka makes these parties her  _ bitch _ . Everyone knows she’s coming, and everyone waits for her. She is a holy constant in their lives, a deity in a high waisted skirt and a shade of lipstick that tells you she is going to destroy you if you let her. And you will let her. Shinji does every goddamn time she opens her mouth.

“I don’t know where you find your clothes.” She’s touching his jacket, picking at the loose threads poking out of his right sleeve. It isn’t loving, or flirty. She’s actively disgusted. His jacket isn’t that bad, but her cutting him down is as good almost just friendly conversation. She is capable of far worse.

“Mm.” He says.

Neither of them care about the stupid jacket. Neither of them are sober enough to care. She’s on her fourth glass of something embarrassingly pink, and heavily diluted with vodka. He’s on his third. And chances are, it isn’t going to stop there because this is kind of their thing. 

They’re kind of in their element. They have matching alcohol tolerances, and when they drink like this they feel like gods among mortals. The best part is that nobody expects it. When the ninth gin and tonic has everyone else on their knees, crying in a puddle of piss and stomach acid, there are Asuka and Shinji. Standing in the midst of it all.  Beacons of light. The top bitch and her right hand man who hates her almost as much as she hates herself. It’s toxic. It’s going to kill them. It’s sweet because it’s all that they know.

It’s quiet for one sweet moment. And then Asuka gives an irritated click of the tongue, and he knows that it’s over. The vicious cycle beats on, the same tired beat it plays every night. He tells himself that he isn’t tired of it tonight. 

Click. Asuka is annoyed. She lets him know.

“I’ll bet you think it’s cute when you ignore me.” She says, waking him from a sleepy trance.

He gives a tiny shrug, and sinks deeper into the beaten up sofa beneath him. It’s soft, and broken, and it smells like weed. Just like most everyone here.

“I’m not ignoring you.”He nibbles absently at his pointer fingernail, and she swats his hand away from his mouth with the fiery wrath of a god wearing expensive perfume. Dirty habit. He always forgets, and she is  _ generous _ enough to remind him.

“Well then,what  _ are _ you doing?.” There’s venom in her voice as she admires her own reflection through red fingernails. Shinji chuckles and thanks whoever the fuck is up there that she’s too absorbed in the idea of herself to have heard that. She keeps talking without looking away.

“Sitting here feeling sorry for yourself, that’s what. There’s a distinct lack of shotglass in my hand, Shinji Ikari, and I think you know what that means.”

He thinks real hard at this one. 

“That you need to…? Go get a shot?” Good answer, he thinks. And contrary to what Asuka definitely believes, the  _ right _ answer. But everything with her is a matrix. Nothing connects easily, nothing is what you think, and everything is a challenge. She looks at him like he may as well have just spat in her face.

“Do you even know what shots are  _ for _ ?” Her offended grimace is almost too much for him to smile. It’s almost cute until he remembers why she’s freaking out on him. That stupid shot game. Every Saturday, without fail, Toji starts up that stupid drinking game and Asuka drags Shinji into it because she doesn’t give an honest fuck about his liver, and she knows he won’t say no to her. 

“Probably something different than what you think.”

“Shots are for winning.” She says. Bingo. “Nobody here is doing shots to get drunk, they’re doing shots to win, and they’re doing it to try and walk out of here thinking that they’re better than us. And they’re not better than us.”

He’s nursing his drink in silence until she says that stuff about people not drinking to get drunk, at which point he promptly laughs into his drink, and calls bullshit.

“I’m almost positive that ninety percent of the people here would disagree with you about everything you just said.”

And then she pouts for a second because she’s trying to think of a way to hurt him badly enough to make him play. Likely just emotionally, but he’s sure she isn’t ruling out physical tactics either. It’s not that Shinji doesn’t like to drink with her. It’s just that the circumstances are kind of shitty. 

She doesn’t want to spend time with him. She wants to win a stupid game in spite of Toji. And Shinji kind of wishes that they would just get it over with and screw already, but he’s also kind of holding out hope that Asuka will someday magically wake up on the right side of the bed. And tell him that she’s so so so sorry. And that she loves him, and this has all just been one giant joke. That she won’t hurt him anymore.

And it makes him laugh at himself. She elbows him in the side, hard, for laughing at something that he won’t tell her about. That fantasy that he’s been holding in his back pocket for so many years is getting too stale. It makes his throat ache when he thinks about it. He doesn’t really want her as much as he just wants to feel something. 

“So are you coming, or what?”

Ah, his favorite question. How kind of her to let him pretend that it’s his decision to make. In two minutes he’ll be standing next to her with a tiny glass cup in one hand, the other hand resting dutifully on her right shoulder. She’ll shrug it off. He won’t try again. Fucking clockwork. They both know he’s coming.

He gives her a look so exhausted that she almost feel bad for him. Almost.

“Shinji.” She warns, her voice teetering on violent. “ _ Are you coming _ ?”

“No.” He tries, rolling his sore shoulders towards his neck until they give a satisfying pop. “Not tonight. Sorry.”

 

**3:05 a.m**

“Look, I don’t throw up. I’m good, really. Just leave me alone. I haven’t thrown up in like two years.”

Shinji vomits for the first time in two years.

The next thirty seconds are an ephemeral lifetime. His knees get weak. The jelly in his head formerly known as a working brain is asking where home is. The scariest part isn’t that he doesn’t know where he is. The scariest part is that he doesn’t care. Wouldn’t ever care. Not if he was sober and splayed out nicely under sweaty sheets. Not when he falls to the cement like a sleepy child. 

His head touches the pavement harder, and more passionately than he has ever touched another human in his life. The absence of the scent of blood is almost, almost a disappointment. Shinji would love an excuse not to go back to school tomorrow. Not to do anything tomorrow.

Not to do anything ever. 

He laughs. It hurts _ so bad _ . Isn’t that funny? Isn’t it funny what life will do to get you to throw in the towel early and sleep six feet under ground for the rest of forever? Isn’t it funnier that this is all entirely his own fault, and there is absolutely no one to cast the fiery cloak of blame onto?

“I never throw up.” He talks in a voice that he swears to god isn’t his own. Must belong to a child. The same child that fell into a cold vat of his own five hour old meal. Shinji Ikari wouldn’t do this. Shinji Ikari is somewhere else right now.

“Of course you don’t.” Says the guy. That guy. The guy from before.  _ The _ guy.

Shinji listens for just a second. Of course he didn’t. That’s right. He hasn’t thrown up since that awful bout of food poisoning that time with Asuka in the student dining hall two years ago. His stomach unsettles, and then settles again. She laughed the whole time. When she caught it herself, he had to hold her hair.

“Of course I don’t.” He assures himself again. He repeats it to himself inside his head and watches the few little flecks of stars that the city lights haven’t eaten yet.It’s so ugly out here and it breaks his heart.

When you’re moving to the city this is never the image you paint in your head. Shinji, no matter how badly he ever hated himself, ever saw himself here. Not on the ground, first of all. Maybe watching the sky from something stupid and basic like a 19th floor balcony. He sees himself now, the him inside his head. Watching a navy purple sky pull into blackness as each and every star is bright, and ever performing. Someone in the distance is playing something very annoyingly American on a saxophone. He isn’t vomiting. Vomiting isn’t ever, ever, a part of the dream.

“I hate this.” He says. 

“I hate this.” He says again, just to be clear. It feels clear. It feels clean. It feels like the most honest thing he’s ever said in his entire life. 

He’s going to say it one more time, he’s decided. Just because it feels good. He opens his eyes this time as if it’ll somehow make a difference. As if to make sure he still hates this, before he throws it on out there again. Lo and behold, he’s off the ground. He’s staring into the street instead of absentee stars, and someone’s phantom limb is keeping him alive and afloat.

“Oh yeah?” Says the guy. That’s right, _ the guy  _ is here. “Me too. Probably.”

Shinji says nothing. Being anyplace but here would be such a blessing. Walking would grant that wish. So that’s what he does. Tries to, anyhow.

“Woah woah woah. I’m all for quick recovery, but- Hey, just a second.” Shinji’s second attempt to wriggle out of the guy’s arm is thwarted. He almost meets the ground again because his body feels suddenly too heavy too control yet too light all the same. Like he’d just fall. Like he’d float away if something wasn’t holding him down.

So he lets himself be held. He grunts in irritation but what he really means is  _ okay _ . They walk. Shinji still hates this. 

“What was it that we were hating again?” Speak of the devil and his fucking coincidental dark magic. 

Shinji holds back an acidic hiccup that burns the top of his throat.

“This.” He gestures towards just about everything. “All of it. Me.”

“You hate you?”

Shinji rolls his eyes so hard that it hurts and wishes again for the nine hundredth time that he wasn’t dealing with this right now.His throat burns with very used stomach acid. His eyes burn with something else. He knows exactly with what. 

_ Don’t.  _ He tells himself. 

“I don’t hate you.”

“That’s because you don’t know me.” His voice cracks and for a second he cannot hear anything else but what he just said. Repeating, and distorting, and changing in his head. Stuck there until forever is over. Like a tired chorus to a song that hurts you whenever you hear it. Broken record.  _ You don’t know me. You don’t know me. _

“If you knew me-If…” Shinji breathes, and lets out that sour hiccup. “If you knew me, you’d wish you didn’t.”

Nobody says anything. Shinji is sure it’s because the guy agrees with him. So why has he not made himself disappear. Why, when it seems like the easiest thing in the world to do, does this guy not disappear into the night sky the same way he mysteriously showed up? Not knowing Shinji seems like a privilege. One he’d take up if he had the chance.

And the guy _ laughs. _ God. Shinji isn’t sure which one of the two of them he’d like to punch in the neck more right now.

“I do know you.” He says, softly though they’ve no one to wake up. “And from my personal perspective, it isn’t the...I dunno’...Catastrophic burden that you make it out to be.”

“No you _ don’t _ .”Shinji, needless to say, is not receptive of that. “You think because I puked on your shoes you know me?” And christ, _ that’s right he puked on this guy’s shoes. _

“Thank you for being nice to me. You don’t have to. You don’t have to pretend that you’re okay with doing this.”

Then it hits him, and it hits him sharp and quick. What  _ is _ this guy doing? 

“Where are...Where are we going?”

“Home.” The guy answers, and shifts Shinji upward when his knees suddenly decide that it’s time for a good ol’ concrete nap. He corrects himself quickly. 

“ _ Your  _ home, I mean. You said something earlier about having to study for an exam tomorrow, right? Kind of hard to do that from a bathroom floor in a house that you don’t live in. Though I’ve admittedly never tried.”

The smart decision here is not to ask about the bathroom floor bit, because the small sober fraction of his brain knows that he doesn’t want to know the answer. But he isn’t out of questions just yet. It’s cold tonight. The walk home is miles long. There’s time for questions.

“How do you know where I live?”

His strange and shadowy counterpart laughs again. Shinji listens this time. It isn’t a cruel laugh by any stretch. It’s quiet, and humble and barely more than a chuckle. Hardly a laugh at all. Almost warm.

“You really don’t remember, do you?” He asks, and the warmth in his voice is physically stunning. Shinji feels different after hearing it, in some way. “Not my place to remind you. A friend helped you out there. Asuka, I think. I’ve met her once before.”

Shinji is somehow immediately sick again.

“Lucky you.” The sarcasm is so thick he can taste it in his mouth. The guy laughs again, this time loud, and full of a personality that Shinji doesn’t know.. It makes him feel good. To know that he can make someone laugh.

“I’ve had better luck than that.” His arm snakes further away as Shinji’s ability to walk by himself comes closer to returning.

It’s sick that he kind of likes this. Being helped. Getting a kick out of attention like an incompetent child, or a crying baby, or Asuka. Shinji once read in a short story that burning to death after you freeze, right before you die, is warm and cozy. Like lying in front of a fireplace. It’s killing you. You have no control over it. You like it. Something tells Shinji that when applied to burning, that isn’t true. 

It feels truer when applied to this.

“You know, I ought to be quite offended that you don’t like me.” Says the guy, and shinji’s brain snaps free of it’s dangerous train of thought. “We had a really nice conversation earlier.”

_ Did we? _ Is his first thought. Remembering is a tough task right now. The shocker here is the fact that Shinji Ikari, no joke, apparently had a conversation with a stranger and they  _ liked it _ .

“I never said I didn’t like you.” Shinji says.

“So you do like me?”

“No.”

The guy, this guy, whoever (Shinji really should ask him his name) laughs again. The soft laugh. The first laugh. Shinji doesn’t know which one he likes better. Or whether or not he likes either of them at all.

“I mean, I didn’t say I did like you. I didn’t say I didn’t.” He testifies, using his free hand to rub at his suddenly aching temples. “Don’t confuse me, my head hurts.”

“I’m not trying to.” The other man consoles. His arm, Shinji has just now noticed, is gone and in it’s rightful place. Shinji is walking like a normal person with a degree to get and an internship to make count and a liver to not destroy. It feels alright. It feels colder.

“But I like you, if it means anything.”

And then there is a feeling. Just once, and for a tiny second that could have gone unnoticed. His stomach flutters beneath his cold skin. Maybe it’s a disease. Maybe he swallowed a small family of moths. Maybe it’s the vodka again. Maybe it’s excitement, but likely not. He’s counting on the moths.

“What did we talk about?” He says so suddenly that it makes him stumble over his feet. “Back there? You said we talked about something nice.”

A steady hand takes his shoulder for safety reasons. Every part of his body is cold except for right there. Asuka was right about this fucking jacket. Good for nothing.

“Nothing super particular. Things. Stuff. Once you really got into the juice you gave a very interesting play by play of the first time you ate a pickle, and let me say, I am still to this second captivated.”

His cheeks get all warm.  _ Just moths. _

“Oh my god you should have left me on the ground.” He cradles his face in one hand and swears to himself, that once he is all sober and good and clean he is going to find Asuka and Toji and Kensuke and when he does, he will have a weapon. “Seriously, why are you still here?”

There is a quiet few beats, and it is long enough to send Shinji’s stomach into a flutter again. In that time, he knows that the guy is going to give a real answer.

“You don’t know it, Shinji Ikari, but you’re worth the time.” Pause.  _ Don’t look at him. Just the moths. _ “There isn’t an incentive for everything. I don’t do things because I have a reason, and I’m certainly not talking to you, or helping you because I want something out of it.”

That’s a first.

“I like you. You do stupid things to make your friends happy, and you’re good to them,and you have things to say that make me think. I can see that in the span of a night. I hope you'll be able to see that some day."

Quiet.

"You're good, Shinji."

Shinji would so love to agree with that.

“I’m happy to have met you.” They’re stopped now, and for the first time during this walk, Shinji can see his eyes. “Even if only for a night, I’m glad to say that I knew you.”

Shinji’s crying now. Just a little, and only noticeable when you look at him straight on. But this guy has nothing else to look at. There is a crying man, and there are a million smelly garbage cans. Which one would you look at?  It was going to happen, he knew that it was. He only wishes it wasn’t know. He only wishes he wasn’t so blindingly fucking drunk and he wishes that he could remember the first time that he made someone like him.

He wishes that it felt worse. Wishes that this didn't feel kind of good.

“Who are you?” Shinji asks, for once and for all. “Who the hell are you?”

 

**11:31 PM, Earlier**

“His name is Kaworu Nagisa and I kinda’ think he should do me.”

Asuka offers this lovely fact into Shinji’s ear, staring across the ping pong table and straight into an unlucky stranger. Shinji can hardly say that he’s surprised. He can’t even see the guy clearly from way over here, but if Asuka is lusting after him, then he must have enough boom boom bang enough to quench everyone in this room.

“You’re gross, I don’t wanna’ know that.” He hisses, harboring a small amount of jealous hurt behind his bitterness. Figuring out how he feels about Asuka pretty soon would be ideal, but isn’t likely.

“You’re no fun.”

“I’m fun.” He argues. “The game is called  _ shots _ . The game isn’t called ‘verbal confirmation that Asuka is going to make an idiot out of herself and regret it’.”

“Don’t we play that game every night?” Toji is his rescuer tonight, swooping in just in time to save Shinji from losing an eye over a moment of brave honesty. Now they’re both in on it. Now they can die together.

“So what are we doing ladies? Are we doing shots, or are we fucking around when we’re supposed to be doing shots?” Toji asks the most Toji question possible, and swings an arm around Shinji’s shoulder.

“The second. As we’ve been doing.” Kensuke makes an appearance, snapping a photo that Shinji will kindly ask him to burn later but secretly love. “For an _ hour _ .”

“Not here you aren’t.” And that would be Hikari, resident virgin mary, and mother hen to all. “People live here, you know. If my house mother sees this house tomorrow, she’ll-”

“Bullshit.” Toji, well, calls bullshit. “This is a house full of dopey women, not a convent. Your house mother will see this mess in the morning and congratulate you for not being such a princess all the time. Lighten up.”

And Hikari lightening up is the first mistake.

Within ten minutes, everyone is kind of crocked. Worst than usual. Fact of the matter is, finals are approaching at lightning speed and everyone is desperate for a chance to forget their impending doom other than Toji, who is desperate for free alcohol in general. In twenty minutes, Asuka’s hair is down all of the way, Shinji is missing a shoe, and Hikari has already gone up to bed.

Shinji looks to Asuka, and wonders whether or not they’re going to pull it together this time. Her skirt is hiked up too high, and she’s clutching the sides of the table, white knuckled. But there is a fire behind her historically cold blue eyes.It isn’t because of the cinnamon whiskey, though the stench of it is lingering on her like she may have bathed in it.

“Don’t look at me like that.” She tears into him as Kensuke takes his turn. “We’re fine. You don’t feel sick yet, do you? Of course you don’t. Man up.”

Shinji bristles. “You know, there’s something kind of demoralizing about a twenty year old women who still wears bows in her hair telling me to man up.”

“And shut up, at that.” She tries to nudge the glass into his hand, and in the process, nearly knocks the both of them over onto the ground. Which is kind of unlike her. She seems off it tonight. If Shinji was any kind of friend, he would cut her off soon. Can he  do that? Is he even allowed to cut Asuka off from anything?

“Maybe you should sit down?” he gently suggests.

“I’m good,  _ I’m good _ .” She hardly gets the last word out of her mouth without jumbling it, so he doesn’t exactly trust her. “Shinji, we’re the _ team _ . The  _ dream _ team. You neeeed to trust me when i teIl you that we can do this! Have I ever failed you at anything? Anything at all?”

Shinji thinks.

“Yes. Multiple times.”

“Shut up.” She hisses, and spits just a little as she does. They both ignore it as she wipes it away. His feelings aren’t hurt. He’s worried about her, though he’d rather not be. Sometimes he thinks she deserves nothing more than his indifference. Sometimes he thinks there’s a chance that he could be in love with her. Sometimes it’s just hate.

“How much did you have before we started the game?” Tonight it’s worry. 

“A lady never tells.” And that means a lot. More than usual.

“Asuka.”

“Shinji.”

He says nothing. Asuka has to impress everyone but herself. That means looking sober and bright eyed and soft and sweet while simultaneously getting shitfaced to the eighth degree. She has to be the cool girl. She has to win, and always always be the best and he will never understand it. 

“Pour it.” She deadpans, smacking the glass into his face. He catches it before she causes any damage. “I’m gonna’ gooo...Grab something. Do  _ not _ fuck this up."

"You said you'd find me a ride back tonight." He baits her, knowing full well that she isn't going to bite.

"What, you can't make it home on your own? God, do I _always_ have to-You know what..." That's when she pulls out a black felt marker from god knows where. She takes his arm by force and he knows better than to ask what she's doing. In large, semi-readable font, she scrawls out his address. Straight across his forearm.  It tickles.

" _There."_ She gloats, like it's the smartest idea she's ever hatched. "Now if you get lost, some helpful passerby can return you home right where you belong. Lost and Found! You'll be fine. I'll be right back, I said I would!"

Except for she didn't say that. Shinji looks at the return adress on his arm and feels like an infant for what _surprisingly_ isn't the first time in the past twenty minutes. He deflates quietly and she doesn't stay to watch him because it kind of makes her sad. Not that she'd ever tell.

"Toodles, okay?”

And he has to accept it when she walks away with her nose up in the air because  _ toodles _ . Toodles is the end of everything. Apparently good friends let their drunk friends walk away unattended at crowded parties, but good friends don’t dare disrespect the rules of toodles. 

_ Do not fuck this up _ she will now be saying for an eternity in his mind. Like he isn’t in danger of fucking up a supposedly prestigious internship at NERV by drinking himself stupid in a room full of fellow interns, but he  _ is _ in danger of fucking up a game with almost no rules. Lovely.

He pours himself a tall shot of someone’s dad’s Hakushu, knowing that there are a million and two better things to subject himself to tonight. Toji snickers from across the table and Shinji would fire something at him if he wasn’t throwing back shot number whatever-and-a-half.

“Toodles.” Toji waggles his fingers, and Kensuke tallies another point on the paper for Shinji. 

“What’s with her?” Shinji instinctively lowers his voice and watches her prowl across the floor.

“What’s  _ ever _ with her?” Says Kensuke, vice president of the Anti-Asuka Langley Soryu club. “You’re acting like she’s ever acted normal a day in her life.”

The Anti-Asuka club stalls to watch their favorite disaster interact with the world that they’ve shunned for the moment. The population does a very convincing job of pretending to love her. She still looks cute, even all screwed up like this. She laughs, and puts her arm around someone. She forgets about him and gives him no choice but to remember her.

“She’s trying to impress some new guy. Wants to expand the inner circle so she doesn’t have to look at us anymore.” Kensuke speaks a truth that makes Shinji wonder why she even bothers hanging out with them.

Toji takes his turn in one heavy gulp and only coughs for a second or two when it’s over.

“I’ll bet you money she’s only interested in helping one thing expand.”

Shinji’s laugh is cut off quickly by something warm flickering inside his stomach. All of him goes red. He coughs and takes the next shot without even realizing that he’s doing it, and so begins another unhealthy habit.

“That’s how she wants to impress people? Getting drunk? Not very  _ Asuka _ of her.”

“Well, what would you do? Rattle off times tables until girls wanna’ drop their pants for you?” Toji thinks he’s funny, and laughs at his own joke while nobody else does because he’s just that kind of guy. “Really, she’s got the right idea. She’s gotta’ do  _ something _ to make people like her.”

“And being nice is too healthy an alternative for her?” Kensuke suggests, and Shinji thinks him stupid to think for even a moment that Asuka would try something like that. She isn’t most people. Being kind would probably kill her.

“Not grand enough for her. Being nice doesn’t get you attention.”

Being nice doesn’t get you anything. Shinji, with his empty pockets and microscopic list of personal contacts would know. He watches her. And then he watches her again. His stomach hurts and he feels like a creep. He wants to go home.

She leans into someone’s ear and whispers something that he can’t hear. He really, really wants to go home.

Toji, who doesn’t understand Shinji but is trying very hard to, is there in an instant with a full shot glass and a sorry face. He swings an arm around Shinji’s shoulder and they watch Asuka quietly dismantle herself.

“The sooner you get over this…” Toji doesn’t finish.

“I know.” Shinji mutters beneath the noise. He knows. He’s trying to.

And then she’s down. It only takes seconds, and the pretty little thing that she has painted herself to be is spilled out onto the floor like a drowned ragdoll. The noise doesn’t cease. The party doesn’t stop. A few people look back and watch her try to collect herself, but then something else interesting happens and she is old news again. 

Shinji is over there as soon as it happens because this apparently his fucking job or something.

“Don’t touch-...G...Get off of me, I’m fine.” Her words are soupy and mashed together in ways that they shouldn’t be. He picks her up under her arms and drags her to her feet. Some other guy steadies her as she half fights them off.

“Alright, lights out.” Shinji tells her.He’s disgusted with himself. Secretly relieved that she’s too out of herself to finish the night. Too out of herself to be better than him. 

“I’m talking to Kaworu. Don’t be rude, come on, get _ off _ me.”

Hikari and her roommates live here. Up the stairs,down the longest hall, and past the fake plastic ficus there is a tiny little room that has only ever been slept in by sad drunk people who can’t make it home for the night. Tomorrow, Asuka will be absolutely thrilled to know that she has made the list.

So Shinji and this other guy take her up those stairs, one of them on each arm. It’s only when they’re half way up that Shinji realizes he hasn’t actually made the effort to see who this guy is.

“Watch the corner.” That guy says.

And Shinji doesn’t watch the corner because he’s very much watching that guy. The guy. The famous, and relatively unlucky guy that Asuka has been after this entire night. It’s dark up here, and Shinji can only make out a few details. There’s a piece of party tinsel behind his ear. He’s too tall, but not much taller than Shinji.

He is, in the shortest words possible, the most prominent thing that Shinji has ever seen in a dark hallway at 12:00 am.

“Corner.” Is the fourth word that he ever says to Shinji. Shinji is too busy over analyzing a random encounter with a helpful guy to actually listen to what he’s saying. Needless to say, he doesn’t watch the corner. The corner clocks him in the back of the head, and the guy laughs in the least demeaning way that Shinji has ever heard. He rubs the spot where the corner hit.

“Yikes.” Shinji says.

“Yikes Indeed.” Says the guy. Kaworu, he thinks. They’re standing there for an oddly warn few seconds before Shinji forgets everything about the woman in his arms and decides that he needs to start a conversation with this guy right  here, and right now.

“Hi.” Is all he can manage.

“Hi there.” Says Kaworu. “We should probably take your friend to bed.”

“Probably.” Shinji agrees, now a blooming shade of red that he prays to god can’t be seen in the dark. They move her into the bedroom and Shinji secretly calls himself an idiot with every step that they take. She’s pretty much flightless by the time they put her to bed. They don’t turn the light on. It’s quiet up here.

It somehow ends up with them both at the foot of the bed, sat out on an old quilt that somebody’s grandmother would be ashamed to see disrespected like this. There’s a smell like violet perfume and dust in the air. It almost makes him ill. But it’s nice here. You can hear the bugs, and a few cars, and somebody’s old radio. The faint chatter of people downstairs. There’s a sliver of buttery light in the doorway that neither of them wish to enter too badly.

“Thanks for that.” Shinji bites his tongue, and stares at the smeared address on his arm. _Goddamn baby._

“Ah, no problem at all.” It seems like he isn’t going to say anything else for a second. “I’ve seen you before. NERV, right?”

“Mhm.” Shinji answers, at first not wondering why he’s never seen this guy at NERV this guy. At first he wonders why they’re still speaking. Why they’re huddled together in a tiny dark room with odd smells and a drunk girl. He hopes that Asuka isn’t awake.

“Internship?”

Shinji nods.

“What else do you know about me?” What first seems like a witty stab at banter melts away into awkwardness when Kaworu doesn’t answer right away. He shouldn’t  have asked that. That was weird. That was a really, really, really weird thing to ask and Shinji is never going to make another friend as long as he lives.

But Kaworu turns to look at him, and cocks his head as if to give this some thought. His thumbnail is in his mouth as he thinks. The tinsel in his hair moves, but doesn’t fall. When he finds an answer, Shinji can see it flicker through his eyes.

“Shinji is your name, I’m pretty certain.” He decides. Easy one. Shinji will give him that. “You’ve got brown hair. Kinda’ tall. Cute face. You’re majoring in Law and Justice.”

Shinji and his innocent soul are all caught up in being surprised that Kaworu could guess about the Law and Justice thing before  _ cute face  _ rings around in his brain about thirteen times. Cute face. He almost chokes on his own spit.

“How’d you, um…” Choke. “How’d you know about me majoring in Law and Justice?

Kaworu extends a finger, and Shinji is prepared for nothing. He pokes it into Shinji’s chest and Shinji stares at it for a whole minute, wondering whether or not this is some absurd sexual gesture that he hasn’t heard of. Shinji is almost ready to do it too when Kaworu clarifies this mess.

“Your shirt.” He says, and Shinji looks down.  _ T3U Law and Justice. _ Beneath the words, there is a little student drawn picture of their school mascot donning a police uniform and a very menacing pair of handcuffs. They never hear the end of it for  _ that _ stylistic choice, but hey, the shirts were already printed.

“Oh.” Shinji then thinks of thirty other responses that are more colorful than “oh.”

“Lucky guess.” Kaworu takes his finger away, and uses it to gesture towards the slumbering mess of legs and blankets. “She yours?”

“Yeah.” 

Kaworu nods. Shinji feels the overwhelming urge to correct himself for some reason.

“I mean, no. We’re not….together or anything. If anything, I thought she was yours.”

And then Kaworu snorts kind of cruely into the dark, like that was either the funniest or most disgusting thing he’s heard tonight. There’s a sense of relief that comes with finding out that the two of them aren’t connected in any way.

“Not likely." Kaworu says suddenly. "I’m kind of pretty gay.”

And in that wide open moment Shinji feels so comfortable replying  _ me too. _

He doesn’t say it, of course. Because deciding on a sexuality finally is too handsome a luxury for him to afford. He watches Kaworu, who is not only scary and kind of beautiful, but now gay, and now twenty thousand leagues above Shinji who might as well be rusting on the ocean floor. He is strange and now he is wise. Shinji is jealous and also he is something else. He doesn’t know what.

He has to look away now.

“Good.” Shinji swallows hard and finds himself with a headache. “I mean, because...She’s definitely into you, and…” Shit. Was that public information? “...Uh. If you were straight you’d probably be into her, and she’s...She’s…”

Asuka mutters a mushy string of words into a decorative pillow and Shinji’s heartbeat speeds up to a pace that most professionals would panic about. He pokes her bare leg and doesn’t lose a finger, which means she’s beyond passed out. He breathes easy for a few seconds. They watch her slip further into dreams.  
  


“Difficult?” Kaworu guesses.

And from the safety of his head, Shinji is screaming _ yes _ .  _ Yes, jesus christ yes. _

“...Kind of.”

For a long few seconds they’re still watching her, Shinji praying silently for Asuka to never find out that he let her lay passed out drunk in some crummy old bed while he shit talked her with a guy she wanted to bang. And to Shinji, that sounds like a goddamn dream. He loves her, sometimes. Sometimes he wants to see her hurt.

“Are you into her?”

Shinji turns his head and opens his mouth to start up the denial train and finds that Kaworu is looking straight at him. Suddenly he knows that Kaworu was never watching Asuka with him. Not at all.

“Sometimes.” This is the right answer, but the honesty doesn’t feel clean and weightless in his chest. It feels wrong. Dirty.

Kaworu nods, and it is so hopelessly impossible to read. Not that Shinji can read people, but there are no telltale signs of any emotion. Disgust brings a slightly narrowed  eyebrow, and an unentertained scoff. Disappointment is a tight smile that you don’t really mean. Not caring looks like not caring.

Kaworu just nods.

“That’s alright.” He says. Like he knows that this is a festering wound that needs to be treated with kind phrases. And the thing is, it almost works for a second. 

But not totally. Shinji lets the silence settle over again because he is very sure that he has done something to bring this conversation to an end. Only he can’t leave. He’s clutching the old quilt with dirty fingernails and chewing the tip of his tongue raw. Some kind of anticipation is murdering him. Only he doesn’t know what kind. But he isn’t uncomfortable.

“Can I ask you another question?” Kaworu keeps talking but Shinji already knows his answer. “Please don’t feel obligated to say yes.”

Shinji waits three seconds so not to seem desperate.

“Yes.” He says desperately. 

“Do you like her right now?” Kaworu asks.

Shinji thinks about it.

Then he watches the door. The light that it lets in. He watches that light wash the wall behind this strange man in yellow warmth. Like an aura. Shinji doesn’t believe in shit like that. But he believes that it is good in here. He believes that he kind of feels something. Believes that it is warm in here, both physically and in bizarre ways that he hasn’t known often before. Believes that the night will be long. Believes that he sort of wants it to.

And then he thinks of Asuka for a split second and physically feels the color red. He knows his answer.

“No.” 

Stranger smiles, barely even at all. Shinji tries it and  it kind of feels good. He doesn’t know what this is. He has absolutely no idea what is going to happen. He isn’t worried about it. This is not the end.

“Do you wanna go downstairs now?” Kaworu asks suddenly, but somehow there is no suddenness in it at all.

Shinji swallows air.

“With you?”

Kaworu is smiling, kind of still. He’s touching Shinji. Has been for a long time. His hands aren’t flirty or intrusive or threatening on Shinji’s arm. They’re just there. They’re existing there for a reason that the alcohol in his blood wants to call fate. Shinji is smarter. He knows not to call it anything.

“If you want.” He replies. “I think we’d be really good at walking downstairs together.”

  
Shinji nods. They don’t go yet. They will when they want to because they don’t need to just yet. It’s warm here. It’s pretty here.


	2. Chapter 2

**1:09 PM**

“I think he's alive.” Seconds happen. Breathing. A long drag from a short cigarette. The birds have been awake for hours now. “Should I hope he is? I don't even know anymore.”

It’s a phone conversation.The speaker is quiet as the person on the other end of the line decides whether or not to respond to that. She smells like beer and talks like a high schooler. Shinji knows who she is before he knows who he is.

“...Am I fucked up for saying that?”  He tells her no, but only in his head. She doesn’t hear him. She isn’t good at reading his thoughts anymore. He doesn’t cry in her lap anymore. He’s here less often. He’s miles away when they’re in the same room. He is so, so, so much like her. That’s what she hates about him.

“Am I so totally fucked up for even thinking something like that?”

There’s a suspiciously vomit-like stench surrounding the area, and it tells him that if she is subconsciously wishing him dead right now, there is a very good reason. Underneath this swath of sweaty blankets, Shinji himself is half waiting to die. This is the script that bad hangovers tend to follow. You have no idea where you are. Everything smells like dead cats. The pulsating in your head: concussion or just a bad headache? Did you fall last night? No, bad question. How many times did you fall last night?

What have you done? Who hates you this time? What, in gods name, have you done?

“So this kid brings him home last night…” Hark, an answer. 

“And I’m in the bathtub...What? Yes I was fucking naked, what do you bathe in, an evening gown? So I hear this knock at the door, and I’m like okay, that’s weird, Shinji has a key. So the knocking gets louder, and I go out there, soaking wet, this stupid kitchen knife in my hand while I’m somehow still managing to hold up my freaking towel, and...What? Of course not.”

And shinji, from beyond his grave of gin and puke, is wishing for the first time since he’s known Misato, that she’d finish her goddamn story. But she digresses like she’s so good at, and spins off into a secondary tale about skin care or something. He isn’t listening anymore.

“It’s a nice bathrobe, I’m telling you, hot soapy water and silk are not friends with each other.”

But he has to stay dead, is the thing. When, and if he lets her know he’s not sleeping anymore, she is probably going to smack him into the sun, if she doesn’t just kill him first. Worse than that, she’s going to want to _ talk _ . A “talk” isn’t really the right work for it. He’d rather call it a yell.

“Have I what? Well. I mean...yeah, I checked on him around noon just to make sure he was still breathing, but an hour is plenty of time to die…”

And now, having just been delivered the knowledge that it’s one o’clock, he very much wishes that he  _ had  _ accidentally filled his lungs with stomach acid passed quietly. That Indian Civilization exam he had at eight this morning? Yeah, worth about forty percent of his grade.Just like the last test was. Forty percent. The one that he missed because.

Because why? Because he wanted to?

Shinji throws up a little bit in his mouth for more than one reason, curls up into his own putrid scent, and considers thinking of Asuka for a minute.That wouldn’t be a good idea, he thinks, as he thinks of the way she’s going to look at him later. She won’t smell like puke, but the taste will be burnt into her throat for days. Shinji knows about her. There are scars on her knees from shambling home at night. From rugby, she says. Says she was an open side flanker back in her day. Back in her day. Like she’s old and wise or something. God.

He swallows and it hurts. It will hurt for a long time. 

And then there’s this softness on his face. He doesn’t entirely realize at first that they’re fingers. Or even that his covers, tacky with dried sweat and dried spew, are long gone. His ears are cold now. His sinuses are on fire. The light is sneaking underneath his closed eyes, and into his skin, burning him down into his blood that he swears to god is boiling him alive. It stinks so fucking bad in here. This is so, so, so bad.

And her fingers are cold and she smells warm. Like cinnamon, and smoke, and dark coffee, and stale breath, and the costly shampoo that she locks away from him.The one made with real passion flower, but artificial blood orange. When she catches the scent of it on his shoulders she all but shoots him in the head. She smells like the mother she will never become.

Her fingernail, the overly grown out one that she won’t cut, traces down his cheek for just a second. Then she’s feeling his forehead again, not knowing exactly what it is that she’s doing, but feeling confident because women do this on TV all the time. She doesn’t know what to feel for so she just keeps her hand there. He can almost see her trying to be ashamed in him. She breathes in.

“He thinks I don’t know he’s awake.” She says. She’s going to have to call you back, she says. 

Shinji listens to her cell phone plop into his covers. She offers him a few seconds more of peace while she’s deciding what to do with him.

“You’re such a bad liar.” She says, her voice tired and sort of sweet. “Even when you’re not even doing anything you are  _ such _ a bad liar.”

Retreat, he thinks. Back down into the covers he burrows, slamming a stray pillow over his aching head in hopes that maybe just maybe, it will save him from her sense of responsibility. She snatches the pillow in one graceful swoop and contemplates beating some sense into him. For now, and now only, she is a pacifist. He gives her a gravely groan, and in response, she strips him of his shell of covers.

“Out.” He tries to scold her out, and she just laughs because there’s more danger behind the gates of a preschool than there is inside the gates of Shinji Ikari. She nudges him with her foot.

“Get up. Now. You can still make it to...pre-intro-to-econ 101, or whatever the hell.” She’s taking another drag and spilling ashes onto his sheets.

“Not worth it.” He opens his eyes just a little bit and suffers the horrible brightness of a single lamp that just last week he said wasn’t bright enough. He only thanks god that he hasn’t replaced it yet. He looks to Misato, who seems a lot more pissed off now that he can actually see her.

“Tough. Move it. Maybe I’ll drive you.”

“You’re not my mom."

And that was a mistake on his part. He doesn’t know why. The gap of silence that follows is small, but in it she is about to say something. He watches her lips start to move, and her unmade eyebrows start to meet in confusion or anger or maybe hurt. They grow a part a little.

“You’d better be glad I’m not your mom.” She finds her words. “If I was your mother, you would have been out the door at six o’clock. And you’d be limping. This would have been grounds for a whooping.”

He kicks at her knee, very much not here for the whole invasion of personal space thing. She doesn’t budge.

“That isn’t how parenting works.” He kicks again. She grabs his ankle and he isn’t shocked by how strong she is. She attended the police academy once upon a long time ago. He wonders if she’s ever gotten to use her strength for anything other than threatening him into going to class.

“Now.” She repeats. The sugar in her voice is melting away at a dangerous pace.

“No.” He mutters. “Don’t feel good.”

And that pisses her off too, if that ugly scoff she just fired off was any indication. She lets his foot go, and punishes him with the window. Any other morning, the term _punishment by window_ wouldn’t mean anything. But the thing about sunlight and hungover people is that they kind of don’t work together. She zips the curtains wide open and he recoils in protest.

“Hey, you think every time I get blasted the night before work I use it as an excuse to stay home and sleep all day?” She doesn’t give him the time to answer. “No. Because I’m a grown up. Because people depend on me.”

Totally serious, she says that. Standing here in smudged eyeliner and a kitty-cat bathrobe circa-1998 tanktop, bra who the hell knows where, Misato claims to be a responsible adult. This isn’t an argument for today. 

“Nobody depends on me.” He says, unable to keep his anti-edgy-teenager filter off for the moment. Too early for that.

That seems to soften her up a little, or so he is hoping from his nest of stink and warmth. She looks at him with her mouth turned a little bit downward. Sorry eyes. He used to hate it when she felt sorry for him. Now it just kind of happens, and there isn’t anything to do about it, so he struggles to even care anymore. She makes a sad sound. It sort of hurts him a little bit, but time will take that away from him.

“Sweetie.” She says. She didn’t have anything else planned to console him with, he can tell. It was just sweetie. Anything else is a lie. “If you want people to depend on you, you have to meet them first. You can’t meet people in bed.”

Well, someone obviously hasn’t heard of the internet. He was going to say that outloud. But it wasn’t negative enough. He’s thinking of something to say while she comes back over to the bed and finds a relatively clean place to sit. She touches his back and he flinches. Not his mother. Not her son.

“I know you’re in a funk.” Funk is a funny way to put it, he thinks. “I know that. I’m not going to try to force you out of it. I’m not gonna’ try to tell you what to do. But…”

There’s always a but. There is always, in every safe corner and warm nook, a loophole. Nothing is ever over or free. There is always a catch, and everything has to be difficult. No exceptions. He burrows deeper into the dark. 

He doesn’t even have to tell her to screw off. Her hand is on his back again. He shakes it off, pushing away her warmth for the last time, not knowing how close she is to giving up on him. Every second she knows him a little less.

He doesn’t see her teeth curling into her bottom lip with such an intensity that it summons blood to her tongue. It wouldn’t do shit if she did. And she’s already decided, anyway. She is officially beyond the realms of pissed off. 

“Y’know, Shinji, I really hope you’re grateful that  I’m as forgiving as I am.” Misato, in the simplest terms, snaps. “Do you think...Do you think that if Ritsuko saw you choosing to sloth around in your own vomit instead of pursuing your education she’d let you keep your internship? Do you think she’d even think  _ twice  _ about finding another kid to pop into your place?”

She’s yelling now, though she’d easily deny it, and the sun is miraculously here for the first time in weeks at the worst possible time, and the birds are fucking screaming. He wants this to be done. He decides to give her the goddamn dialogue that she wants. Press A to fight back. Press B to give in and shut up.

“No.” He says, with the actual enthusiasm of the color grey.

“Then why shouldn’t I?” She asks. “Why am I any different? Why should I just let you sit here and be a sad little boy when  _ none  _ of my colleagues would do the same?”

Breathe. “I don’t know.”

Actual bullshit. They both know it. They both know that this situation, their particular situation, is different. Do they know why? No. A reason would be nice, but this is just the way this is, and maybe pretending to hate it makes them feel a little bit more comfortable with it, but nothing is going to change. She isn't going to kick him out. He isn't going to leave.

They don't know why it works this way. It just does.

So really, in the end, she hasn’t a thing in the world to say to him, which is why she's standing there in silence, honoring the wish of every half-ex boyfriend who's ever dared to tell her to shut her goddamn mouth. Shinji makes her quiet in a way that most men will never achieve.

No, she's thinking. Not a man. Not a boy either, but not a man. Something. 

“I don't even scare you anymore.” She admits. To herself. His attention is a quiet plus side.

When he rolls over, she is reminded that he's alive. That isn't the scary part. The scary part is that it shocks her. His face is shadows and unwanted whiskers and so many other things. She wishes he'd turn over. She wishes, sort of, that he’d go back to sleep. 

“You always scare me.” He says.

“And you always were a bad liar.”

Sometime in the next quiet minute she begins to give up on him. He won’t look at her. Tells himself that soon, in a second he’s going to get up and slam the door and be the boy in the book who never comes home, who never calls again, and who everybody misses. He will make her sorry in the gentlest of ways.

Not two seconds go by. She gets up to leave. All of the sudden he has never felt so sorry in his life. He doesn’t know what for. For being here, and smelling bad, and making her say nice things when she probably doesn’t want to. For taking this room in her house when she could be renting it out and giving her jack-shit in return. For that one time. And the time after that. That other time, too.

“Misato.” Shinji calls out. Voice like dust. She doesn’t pick up. He almost doesn’t try again. “Misato? Are you still there?”

Of course, she doesn’t say. She has responsibilities here, that she didn’t ask for, that she never fucking asked for, but she will try to keep up with them until she can’t anymore. And then she will try harder. She will wait for the storm to pass, but unlike most people, will stay outside and fuck with the storm until it goes away. Maybe then she’ll go outside. Maybe then the sweet old lady at the grocery store will stop asking her about the bags under her eyes.

“I’m here, sweetheart.” He hates that. 

“What would you do right now?” He asks, subconsciously promising himself that this will really, honestly, seriously be the last time he asks for life advice from a grown woman who just finished washing her hello kitty underwear in the kitchen sink. “What would you do right now if you were me?”

Probably her favorite question in the world. In the universe, maybe, with the exception of  _ “My god, are those real?” _ which he has never asked her, though she says people do it all the time. But when she turns around, she is one thousand years younger. Misato Katsuragi has opinions spilling out of every orifice of her body. She is bright again. She is spry. An entire life management team, tied into a killer body and a pair of baby pink slippers.

“ Okay. Hear me out.” Just four words. The four horsemen of the verbal apocalypse. He hears her out. She nests into the clean corner of his bed one last time, legs tucked under and hands folded tightly like the good girl she doesn’t even _ try  _ to be.

“You know me. I don’t wanna’ tell you how to live your life. I don’t like to meddle.” He choke-scoff’s and she swats him for it.  “But I _ am  _ gonna’ tell you, hypothetically, what I would do if I were you. Hypothetically.”

“Hypothetically?” He teases her. Swat number two is dutifully endured.

“ _ Hypothetically.  _ Ass. Hear me out.”

So he hears her out,  _ again _ . 

“I would get up and shower. Put my bedding in the wash and ask Misato  _ really really  _ nicely if she’d put them in the dryer for me later.” He takes a sniff, dies a little, and feels kind of bad that she had to  _ advise _ him to shower.

“And then…” She continues, letting her voice grow just the tiniest bit more gentle. “I’d get myself a coffee at the convenience store. And I’d hurry up and make it to my 2:30 class to make this day at least a little useful...That’s what I’d do.”

She takes a puff from a newborn cigarette that Shinji can’t remember her lighting (where did she get a lighter?), and a fresh coil of white smoke is born into the air, only to die in the only slice of sunlight in the house. She has made her peace. 

“That’s what I’d do if I were you.” She says. And how unfortunate it is that she isn’t. How beautiful would it be to be someone else. Even someone just like you. Even if just for a day. 

He offers her an understanding nod, a small one that doesn’t require much neck work. He hopes that it’s enough for her because he really, really doesn’t know what to say right now. Get out of bed? Go outside? Spend actual, real life money? What do you say to such convoluted and achievable advice like this? Okay, that’s what I’ll do?”

“Okay.” He tells her. “That’s what I’ll do.” 

She’d smile at him, if it wasn’t beyond her at this point. When he said okay, that was when she didn’t need to be the styrofoam, pseudo-mom anymore. She’s the cool girl again. She smokes cigarettes at the foot of your bed and tells you what to do. She will never tell you which side of her is real. You will never ask.

“Okay.” Ash falls from her hand. She doesn’t watch it drop. “Then that’s what you’ll do.”

So that it is. And so that it will be. He hopes that she’ll make herself scarce before he tries to get out of bed, purely because he’s almost positive that he isn’t wearing pants, but considering the amount of times she’s accidentally seen his penis, Shinji is sure she isn’t conflicted about sticking around. He’s about to ask her to leave when he notices that look on her face. That look. A thinking look. She’s in the middle of a thought. Her reign of care and terror has yet to die.

“And I would call that boy.” She adds.  He wasn’t all the way awake before that.  “And I would apologize to him.”

An _ d that. _ That is when he gets up. In under two seconds he is up, able bodied, and feeling the fear of god in thirty one million ways, all beginning and ending with  _ “call that boy”. _ Fear, though not typically used in medicinal  practices, is a hell of a drug. When you are afraid, you are nothing else. When you remember the boy, the hangover is gone. The boy.

Shinji opens his dry mouth and knows, knows,  _ knows _ that he shouldn’t even ask. He pulls his phone from the crack between his bed and his nightstand, where he knows without fail, it will always be when he wakes up hungover. He almost doesn’t even turn it on. And yet, what else is there to ruin? What, in god's name, has he got left to lose?

“What boy?” He asks. His last words before the storm. He thumbs the on button.

Twenty three missed calls. Thirty four new texts. Only about five of them aren’t from Asuka. Those five are the only ones that don’t start with “ _ fuck you fuck you fuck you _ ”.

 

**12:34 AM, Last Night**

Two minutes after midnight, it rained. And it rained, and it rained, and it rained. The word around the ping pong table was that nobody was getting home. The roads were oily slick because it hadn’t rained in awhile, and there was hearsay that drunk driving on a road that was pretty much the larger equivalent of the underside of a banana peel was  _ probably _ dangerous. From cracked open windows, you could smell the trees sweating, and the dirt rising up, and a little bit of oil, and mostly just earth. Kaworu said there was a name for that. Petrichor. He was the first one to go outside.

It took seven other people, and the sweet spitty end of a wine cooler to force Shinji outside. But before that, he watched from the propped open window. He watched them, without shoes and coats, get destroyed by rain and mud and scent and decided that twenty something is the closest you can get to being a kid without surrendering the right to drink and legally buy good porn. He watched them be drunk, and old, and completely fucking broke, and he watched them forget that they were.

He watched Kaworu, who had lost the tinsel behind his ear. Forming a closed daisy chain with two or three other people that he probably didn’t know, spinning like an idiot, like there weren’t at least seven people in this neighborhood looking for an excuse to call the police on some drunken college kids. When they fell, nobody noticed. They kept talking. Kept being the cool kids. They were a movie, and he felt guilt in knowing that he could watch forever. 

And then Kaworu was gone from the circle, and when Shinji tried to look for him, the front door opened behind him. Everyone’s outside, Kaworu told him. His hair was this wet shade of honey white and Shinji was drunk enough to ask him whether or not it was natural instead of saying hello. He laughed. Didn’t answer. He was soaked in a way that would bother him for hours and hours if he was the kind of person to let it. Shinji would come to know that he wasn’t. Come out, he said, or something like it. That was how Shinii became the last person out of the house.

Kaworu was there, in the mess of rain and warm bodies and dirt, but only in small pieces of time. Lost, for the most part. They saw each other in glances, and when people asked Shinji who he was looking for, he didn’t know that he was lying when he said no. When Toji kind of materialized out of nowhere and almost broke Shinji’s neck with a tackling hug, he abandoned his search in the name of lightening the fuck up. 

And he did. He is. He would like to think so, anyway. He looks up from his spot under the old maple, counts exactly two stars, and is okay with the lack of romanticism in the sky tonight. He’s here with Toji, who he isn’t exactly trying to woo, anyway. 

“You know, you’ve been really un-Shinji tonight.” Says his friend, who is being an acquired taste at the moment. Shinji blows an offended raspberry, but isn’t really that offended.

“I’ll bet you think that wasn’t a backhanded compliment.” He says. Toji elbows him in a way that comes off as friendly, something Asuka hasn’t mastered yet, and probably won’t try to.

“I’m serious.” Toji searches his pockets idly.

“I’ll bet you are.”

“Shut up.” He says, pulling out a self-rolled cigarette. Shinji didn’t even know he smoked. People change with the seasons, he supposes. “I’m trying to be nice. I just wanted to let you know I’ve noticed, that’s all.” Shinji nods.

“I don’t think I’ve ever been complicated for being tolerable before.” Shinji sort of winces when Toji laughs, because his laugh is ugly, but in an endearing way. His girlfriends probably think it’s cute, until they’re on the other end of it.

“Get used to it, pal.” Toji mumbles through the butt of his cigarette, having a difficult time with the lighter in this wind. “Nobody’s ever good anymore. People are assholes, or they’re tolerable. If you happen to find _ another _ category, gimme her number.” 

Shinji scoffs, because that isn’t even the most negative thing he’s heard Toji say tonight. Or in the past ten minutes. He’s another question mark in Shinji’s weird life. They’re friends, and this he hopes will never change, but he sure as hell would like to know why. Not that it matters. He’s fine with this. He’s fine with maple trees, and backhanded compliments, and a lack of stars that ceased to be disappointing a long time ago.

“What’s on your mind, sport?” Toji channels the late Jay Gatsby, thinking he’s cool enough to do so.

“Not much.” Shinji lies, stops, and reconsiders. “Since when do you smoke?”

“I don’t smoke.” Toji, the smartest and brightest jewel in the box, continues to smoke. Shinji, mulling over a response, is so very close to begging for clarification when Toji passes the loosely rolled cigarette that Toji  _ definitely _ isn’t smoking over his  way. “And neither do you. But it’s been a tough week. Been a good night.”

Good night. Something bright rolls through the sky. Shinji hears someone nearby call it a shooting star.Everyone knows that it isn’t. No one will mention that it’s just a small jet, and everyone will call it a shooting star. When there isn’t much to like about people, Shinji likes that about them. He thinks of Kaworu again. He’s free for another thirty seconds before the thought comes back.

“Did you know that guy?” Shinji asks. “The one that helped me put Asuka to bed? Do you know anything about him?”

Toji stretches a little bit, and yawns at the mention of being put to bed.

“What, the dude Asuka was being thirsty about?” Shinji,though he himself isn’t wild about that description, nods in approval. “No. Her yammering was the first I’ve heard of him. New, I guess. Weird. Wonder who he’s friends with to end up around here. Why? You wanna’ beat him up?”

The thing is, Shinji has so little experience in actually dealing with his erratic pop-up ad emotions,could very well want to beat this guy up. He doesn’t know. He’s interested. The reason is yet to be discovered.

But he looks at Toji, who wouldn’t understand. Toji who would try to understand, but likely just end up asleep or ready for a subject change by the time the conversation got deeper than boobs and buffalo wings. Shinji sighs a little.

“Yeah.” He says. “Yeah, I wanna’ beat him up.”

At fifty minutes past midnight, it rains again. Hard. It’s unforgiving this time. What were once delicate, and even cute little droplets, are now big, and thick, and coming down in little slaps that sting the side of your face when you look up at them. People are flooding inside within minutes of the downpour, and this time Shinji is the first of the movement. 

He doesn’t love being alone, but he doesn’t hate it. It’s just that nobody really knows that the basement laundry room exists, so there’s a distinct lack of stink and noise there. As well as that, Shinji has never been the kind of guy to sit around in a wet shirt and be cool with it. Not when there are things like dryers, and warm rooms that god didn’t create to just sit around and go to waste. So he doesn’t feel bad being down here,  shirtless in a warm room, alone and unattended. It’s nice. Not weird.

Shinji shuts the dryer, and presses a random smattering of buttons and knobs that he  _ thinks _ won’t ruin his shirt, or blow up the house or something. All there is to do now is wait. All there was to do was wait, but now the stairs are creaking, and that means that someone is walking down here, and that means that his hiding spot is kaputz, and that means that it’s time for friendly conversation. He rests against the dryer and rubs his head, just now thinking that maybe drinking that much wasn’t a great plan.

“Oh, sorry.” The creaking stops. Kaworu is here. “I just got sent down for ice, I didn’t mean to-”

“No, no. It’s- You’re good.” Shinji stutters.  _ Kaworu _ is here. Kaworu is here, and he just walked in on Shinji being shirtless and alone in the basement with absolutely no clear explanation in sight. So now he thinks that Shinji is some weird guy who walks around shirtless in people’s empty basements. Awesome. Definitely the most desirable outcome of the night.

“I was just...Uh. I was…”

“...Drying your shirt?” Kaworu puts two and two together because it really wasn’t that hard in the first place. Dryer. Wet clothes. Come on, Shinji.

“Yeah.” He says. “Yeah, drying my shirt. Sorry, I just...Don’t do well after mixed drinks.”

“Hey, that’s fine.” Kaworu closes the distance a little bit, and Shinji wonders whether or not they’re going to talk again. Like they did upstairs. “No harm in that. Quite the weather out there.” 

“Yeah.” Shinji says, frantically checking the inside of the dryer to see if his shirt is decently wearable yet. Still wet. Shit. He would very much love to have this conversation clothed. “It’s...Pretty weathery out there.” 

That’s the end of that conversation. Shinji can safely say he’s never been as inept at social interaction as he has been for the past minute. The worst part is that Kaworu hasn’t fucked off yet, and the worst  _ worst  _ part is that Shinji doesn’t want him to. He had imagined later conversations with Kaworu earlier, after they’d came downstairs. And in those conversations he was clothed, and witty, and always had something interesting to say. He was definitely wearing a shirt. You know you’re a piece of work when you fantasize about having normal, successful conversations. 

“Hey, do you know anything about an ice chest down here?” Kaworu asks, remembering his mission. It’s now that Shinji catches the fact that he’s still wet, hair pushed back to keep it from dripping in his face. Probably the last one inside. Goddamn free spirits.

“Uh, yeah.” He points off to a janky little ice bin near the garage door. “Right over there. There’s a lock on the bottom, so you gotta’ undo it first.”

“Gotcha.” He steps off to complete his task, having none of the trouble with that stupid rusty lock that Shinji has every single time he uses it. He retrieves the ice. He will be gone in a few seconds, and Shirtless McLonely  will be solemn again. 

“Doesn’t that bother you?” Shinji asks, almost unaware that he’d even opened his mouth to speak in the first place. Kaworu is still mostly inside the chest, rooting around as if ice is hard to look for in a freezer. 

“Doesn’t what bother me?” His sound is muffled by five dollar pizza and freezer burnt popsickles. Shinji feels like he should roll his eyes. And yet. Yet he gives a sort of laughy scoff that only comes off as mildly impatient. Progress. 

“Being soaked.  _ Walking around  _ soaked. Not doing anything about it. You’re not cold?” 

Kaworu, useless kaworu, emerges from the freezer chest with a very artificially red Popsicle, and no ice to show for his small struggle. He unwraps it and sticks the cellophane wrapper into his pocket. He eats it. He shows no remorse for his failed task. Only then does he offer a shrug. When Shinji watches him exist he feels somehow microscopic.

“Oh I’m pretty cold.” He says. “It just doesn’t really bother me.”

“Wish I could share your sentiment.” Shinji analyzes his every word. Too bitchy? Too sarcastic?  _ Not bitchy and sarcastic enough? _ Popsicle boy laughs just a little bit, and it still wakes up the hairs on the back of Shinji’s neck.

“I can see that.” He observes. Shinji wonders what he’s alluding to for a second, before the cold chill sweeping across his naked shoulders slaps the common sense back into him. The dryer hasn’t buzzed yet, but screw it. He pulls his shirt from the still spinning contraption, and waves it out a little bit in hopes of shaking away some of the warm, tacky wetness that’s still clinging to it. He gives up, and pulls it over his head.

“Yeah, well.” Shinji says. For a long few seconds that’s all he says. Conversations kind of happen in two parts. The ball is still in shinji’s court, and “ _ yeah, well. _ ” is pretty much social code for fuck off. “I catch colds easily.”

While the myth about catching sickness from cold temperatures can be disproved by listening to your 8th year science teacher, or literally searching a few words on google, it’s certainly better than saying nothing at all. Kaworu, who is sitting on top of the freezer now, gives his two cents.

“Well, that’d be rough right about now. With finals coming up, and whatnot.”

Which raises another question; does he even go here? The semester is almost up for every school, so finals are common knowledge. If he’s been floating around NERV, why is this the first he’s seen of him? Why is he here? What does he have to do with a mostly tight knit group of crime majors and horny band kids? And he almost asks.

There is an accusation on the tip of his tongue, a lifetime of questions begging to slip out and be answered, but then Kaworu is leaving. Not impolitely, of course. He gives some sort of average goodbye, finally retrieves the ice, and as he ascends the rickety staircase Shinji is so sure this will be the last time they speak. Normally he would say nothing. Normally he’d let this all go and black out and let Misato yell at him for it tomorrow. Normally. But he is not himself tonight

“Do you wanna’ hang out?” He asks.

Kaworu nods. He says sure. They leave the basement, they return the ice to the girl who plays first chair in the university’s orchestra, but feels no qualms in getting sloshed on the weekends. They sit on the outskirts of the noise. They talk. Shinji learns.

His name is Kaworu Nagisa. He knows music, and music knows him. He doesn’t drink. He doesn’t talk about himself much. He is 5’11, near sighted, and interested in _ everything _ . He doesn’t drink. He listens well.

His name is Kaworu Nagisa and Shinji does  _ not  _ think that Asuka should do him.

Oh no. In fact, he thinks she should do the opposite. That could be several different approaches, of course. Friendly conversation. A polite shake of the hand, which is neither too warm nor suspiciously lingering. Staying away from him at all costs. He likes that one best. Either or all of these would work nicely, he thinks. No harm done. This is for her, he thinks. The best for her.  He doesn’t exactly want to say he’s too good for her. Walking downstairs with someone, however regal it may have been, doesn’t really set up that much of a friendship. But it sets up something that he doesn’t see a lot of, and that’s a _ potential _ friendship. Asuka has a thing for royally fucking those over. 

Friendship. Maybe that’s what he’s been sniffing out in this stranger all night. Even if that hardly feels complicated enough. Even if he keeps sneaking glances over his shoulder to see whether Kaworu looks any different in this lighting. It’s around one in the morning. This marks the longest time they’ve been together without getting lost. Shinji doesn’t even know why that matters. Why he keeps thinking about it.

“I don’t usually drink.” Shinji changes the subject in his head, as if it was effecting things in the real world.

Kaworu doesn’t point out the shallow glass of something brown and diluted that Shinji is clutching white-knuckled. Shinji suspects that maybe he’s too nice to go around calling people liars. 

“I wouldn’t call you out if you did.” Kaworu shrugs a little bit, letting his back rest coolly on the wall behind them. While he’s busy people watching Shinji kills the rest of whatever the hell this is (shochu and coffee? piss?), and shoves it away to pretend like he never even had it in the first place. Crutch? What crutch?

“This is a drinking party, anyway.” He continues. “Didn’t come here to scold people and lose myself in prayer.”

“...What  _ did  _ you come here to do?” Not two seconds pass before he commences backpedaling. “Sorry, that sounded rude, I just meant…”

He waits for an interruption that Kaworu won’t give. It’s strange. Someone letting him talk. Someone patient enough to wait around for his mind to work. Not batting an eyelash, or tapping his foot to the tune of boredom. He is, so it seems, generally interested. It gives Shinji chills.

“It’s just that I haven’t seen you around here before.” He stops and allows himself a second to think. “...And it kind of _ sucks _ around here. I don’t know why anybody without a personal connection would come here for  _ fun _ . Especially if you aren’t drinking.”

Beyond them, someone breaks a glass. Someone tunes a guitar, a cocktail shaker rattles, ugly laughter, someone’s french electro-pop album that they  _ swear _ is in right now, sneeze, burp, clap, the constant buzzing of an old refrigerator. These are the sounds that your mother warned you about. And then Kaworu’s voice again. A special guest track.

“You don’t seem like you think it sucks here.” He suckles at the stained end of a wooden Popsicle stick. “I guess the fifth shot kind of does that, huh? I think you lost, by the way.”

Shinji hadn’t even thought about that. Without Asuka to drive his liver to suicide, winning that stupid drinking game wasn’t even a B list priority. She was busy dreaming of the slowest, and bloodiest way to murder him, and he was busy chasing the boy she’d been chasing earlier. He was kind of busy. So sue him. Of course, though the drinking game themed chapter of the night was far over, that didn’t mean it couldn’t still exist to haunt him. Kaworu had seen it, apparently. Sweet.

“Oh my god.” He closes his long pause, slinking down into a puddle of self-loathing goo. Head in hands. Brain somewhere beyond it. “I don’t even wanna’ know whether or not you saw the whole thing.”

“Oh-ho, I did.” He says. “Flawless technique, for someone who doesn’t usually drink. Must be a fast learner.”

Though his web of lies was relatively small this time around, it was still sticky as hell, and his face definitely wasn’t this red before. Still, Kaworu looks like he could care less. He’s looking at Shinji like there’s something there to look at, habitually biting at the chewed end of his popsicle stick. His shirt is still wet enough to stick to his collar bones, and he’s enjoying the company of a liar. Shinji would be interested in knowing what  _ does _ bother this guy.

“If you haven’t learned already, I’m a heavy drinker and a habitual liar.”

When Kaworu laughs this time, it’s big. Not huge, but big. Real, and healthy, and the least forced thing about this entire night. When it slows, Shinji wishes it hadn’t. Making people laugh is something, but making Kaworu laugh can only be described as something else. He isn’t worried that he’s laughing at him anymore.  He isn’t, for the time being, worried about anything. Odd.

“Shinji.” He says, and Shinji’s blood goes cold in the best of ways. “You don’t have to feel bad about letting loose. You’re a person. That’s the cool thing about people, they’re allowed to make mistakes in the name of evolution. Mistakes are what make people work. Keep making them. For science.”

Shinji looks at Kaworu, and thinks that under the right circumstances, there is a good chance that talk like that could have made him cry. He watches. And watches, and watches, and waits, and waits, and comes to the conclusion that this is real life and he is very, very lucky tonight.

“You are  _ so  _ weird.” Shinji says.

Half of a smirk curls onto Kaworu’s face.

“ _ So _ weird.” Shinji continues, coming back to earth when Kaworu takes his right hand and holds it with both of his own. When his heart starts to beat, he wonders if it’s ever actually worked before right now.

“Shinji.” He says again, his name fitting into Kaworu’s mouth just as perfectly the second time around. “We’re hanging out. That means that I’m responsible for at least half of you. And if you don’t have a good time tonight, then I’ll have done a terrible job.”

“...Okay.” Shinji manages to say from his new catatonia. 

“Do you wanna’ have a good time tonight?”

“Okay.”

“And do you wanna’ go win that game and kick about six different asses?”

“Okay.”

“Do you, Shinji Ikari, want to make a healthy dose of bad decisions tonight?”

“Okay.”

Kaworu releases his hand, but not him. After all, he is responsible for half of him tonight. When they get up, everything is terrible. The lights here are ugly, and pretty, and the smell of rain and sweat is threaded throughout every last square foot of this horrible world. Everything is alive. Everything awful is instantly beautiful.

“Then count me in.” Kaworu says. “I’m glad to have met you, Shinji Ikari.”


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh gosh I'm sorry this is so late!!! Yeesh. I just couldn't write this in a way that I liked and honestly I'm still not sure about it but whatev. Thank you for your patience!

**June, 1997**

Long before pink velvet sweat jackets and hiked up denim skirts, there is a girl in a yellow sun dress. 

She touches down just before summer, and takes refuge from her mysterious home life in the lives of those willing enough to take her. Which, mind you, is not a high number. She's intimidating in the only way that a thirteen year old can be intimidating. She’s from Frankfurt.  When she smiles it's mean. She wears Adidas sneakers, real ones that she bought with her own money, which she let's you know often. She doesn't curse, and somehow it makes her cool. 

And long before bleach stained sweatshirts, or the murky bottom of a red plastic cup, there is a boy. And that's really all that there is to it. He is fourteen.

And at fourteen, Shinji is as grown up as he will ever be. That's the thing about having a dead mom and an absent dad. Parents, if nothing else at all, are scissors. And as horrifically pseudo poetic as that sounds, Shinji starts to believe it at fourteen when the brief and fleeting letters from his father stop showing up in Misato’s box at the local post office. They're never addressed to him, anyways. Always her. Have him there by six. Can't make it on Sunday. 

And that's how a child stops growing, he thinks. They don't necessarily have to be done growing, but if you can snuff out a sprout or whatever before it starts to flower, you can sure as hell cut off a child before they grow up. Everything grows with love. Everything in the world. And that, he thinks sometimes, is maybe why he never gets better at math, or doesn't feel the urge to learn how to drive, or get any taller than his friends, or develop any healthy ambitions for the future. Or do anything. Be anything. But hey, that's alright. Being happy is hardly a prerequisite to being alive. 

He has been here long enough, and will be here longer still after that. Longer than her. She’s lucky. She is a bird wherever she goes, pretty and new and temporary, somehow even if she stays for the rest of her life. And Shinji just grows into the architecture, happy to ignore and to be ignored. No, he’s alright with himself. He likes routine. He likes being a wall. 

Then she crashes into him.

It’s may when she lands in town, but it’s June when she apparently decides to nest. Shinji had thought that because she was pretty, and because pretty is apparently a synonym for  _ nothing is wrong in my life _ , that her parents had probably moved for work, or that she was here on some sort of au pair type deal. It’s not that he even really knows or wanted to know or cares in the slightest degree, but the general consensus was that she’d be gone by the next school year, sipping foreign teas and chewing bubble gum on someone else’s dime. 

Turns out her mom is dead and her dad is sick of her. Don’t judge a book, right?

Misato Katsuragi is a drunk, and an emotional wreck, and a certified bleeding heart, and now the legal guardian of two equally fucked up gremlins. But she’s only ever called them that once, and not to their faces anyway. She is too damaged to fix them up at this point, because three shards of three completely different broken pots can’t really come together in the end. She isn’t really trying to fix them anyway. Just give them a place to sleep, or cry or do artwork, or whatever it is that sad kids do. And she has a lot of love to give. To learn how to give.

Shinji, on the other hand, does not. 

But she comes to live with them, despite the protests that he never voiced. They share a world and a wall between broom closet bedrooms and walks home from the grocer. They communicate when they have to, and when she is willing to share precious words with a stupid little boy in supermarket sneakers. 

At one point he works up enough courage to ask her to a movie. Something campy and short. In later years he will remember it to have been Men In Black, though he will never be exactly sure. She just laughs and takes a different route home without him. No big deal. He just walks home the usual way, and loses the ability to ever talk to girls without sweating and shaking, and picks up some milk from the corner store. It’s fine.

Misato says it’s a mental thing. That maybe her mom picked on her hair, or a boy hurt her feelings once and she’s shelled up to protect herself like a turtle or something. Turtles are at least moderately friendly. A turtle probably wouldn’t call you a tasteless wretch for wearing sandals and socks. No, he thinks that in terms of the animal kingdom, she’d more likely be a mean little cat or a tiger shark or something.

“Or a black widow spider.” Toji offers through a mouthful of bread one July evening where the park is empty and the grass is itchy. “They eat their boyfriends, did you know that? And they can kill you pretty badly. My brother says you swallow at least one spider a year in your sleep. They crawl into your mouth! Sick.”

“Well, she hasn’t done that yet.” Says Shinji. Toji swallows his food (thankfully) and takes another generous bite before opening his mouth to talk again (inevitably).

“Give it time.” Toji says, turning the conversation to better suit the overall fourteen year old aesthetic. “I don’t get why you’re getting all twisted up about this, man. A hot girl moves into your house for keeps and you’re tripping out over her _ personality _ . I don’t get you.”

“I don’t get _ her _ .” A pause long enough for Toji to start in on an obnoxious bag of chips. “She doesn’t act like she did in school. She yells all the time, but not in the same way I guess. Sometimes she doesn’t brush her hair.”

“Gross.”

“Shut up. I mean, it’s just that. I don’t know. She’s rude and snappy at school, yeah. But almost in a cool way that makes people want to be on her side. At home she’s different. I don’t know.”

“You overthink things.” He snorts. “Maybe she just doesn’t like you.”

“Yeah,” Shinji says. “Maybe.”

They watch the sun burst and go home to wherever it sleeps when the sky gets purple. It’s an accident that they watch the sunset like this every night. From the bottoms of trees, and rooftops. It’s when they know that it’s time to go home, and forget any vulnerable conversations they may have had, and reset for the next day. Toji stretches his back, indicating the end of another session.

“I wouldn’t worry about it.” He says. “Not like it’s your problem, anyway.”

“Right.”

And then they go home to their prescribed lives with promise that they will do the same thing tomorrow. Shinji walks home in the dark. By the time he’s home, Misato is already in bed with a sleeping pill under her tongue and dinner left sweating in the microwave. She’s left him a note.  _ It’s tom yum _ , she says, _ save some for your sister _ .

She probably thinks it’s cute to say things like that, and not inappropriate or weird at all. Maybe it’d be tolerable if they actually got along, or really even talked besides one sided conversations that were always initiated and ended by Shinji. She isn’t here, anyway. But it looks as though she at least  _ quickly _ ghosted through here, because the living room is just about totaled with girl magazines and littered pillows and empty coffee cans. That could have been Misato’s doing too, but the beer cans and ashtrays are in the  _ kitchen _ this time. Blaring still through the early night is a Roxy Music album on it’s third repeat, and the whisper of an televised infomercial that nobody ever turned off.

He leaves it all to fester until tomorrow, when he will inevitably be tasked with cleaning up after the war. 

The room above the kitchen has belonged to him for a long time now. Long enough to have lost the smell of warm dust and old wood, and blossom into laundry detergent, and the men's deodorant that Misato brings home for him in three packs. The lightbulb is near burnt out. It always has been. The window is always open. He leaves the light off and lays down without undressing. Living another day is hardly an accomplishment. But he finds comfort in the things that he can. And there is comfort in knowing that maybe by the thousandth sleep here, he will be closer to calling this home.

But it isn’t the thousandth night yet. Maybe not even night number five hundred. It’s hard to keep track of anything when you solely operate on comfortable automaticity. And instant noodles. And powdered coffee. The occasional bag of potato chips, if you’re feeling fancy. 

And that is the extent of it. Nobody exists on purpose. And so you do what you can, tying yourself to the ground with friends and tv shows and favorite sodas and hoping, but never too hard, that it will be enough to keep you here. And it is, sometimes.

It is, he thinks, and almost goes to sleep. Almost kicks fate out of the way with a sleepy foot and rolls over into soft dreams. 

But someone starts yelling outside. And for a reason,  _ any  _ reason, he chooses not to tune it out, and so the butterfly effect claims another victim.

“ _ It isn’t okay.”  _ She shouts. The roommate. There is no mystery to that, at least. “ _ Don’t say that to me, stop lying to me!” _

Never quite trained in the art of  _ mind your own goddamn business _ , Shinji listens in for a second voice and is surprised (but not top surprised) to hear no one else. Huh. So she  _ is  _ unbalanced. Makes sense, now that he thinks of it.

“ _ You said two months tops.”  _ She says. “ _ And I waited for you.” _

She’s crying.

“ _ But I thought-Stop it! Stop interrupting me, you never wanna’ hear what I have to say! Please, just let me talk!” _

Close the window. It’s unfair to listen to her like this, he knows it is, and there’s no other way to help her, anyway. She’s just afraid. Maybe sick. This is unfair to her. It’s unfair.

“ _ It’s not fair.”  _ She cries. “ _ You promised me, papa. You said. Last time you called me you said I remember it I know you did-” _

He should just shut the window, so she can be alone, so the acid in his stomach stops threatening to let him taste it, so she can figure this out for herself. Just shut the window and move on.

“ _ Because I hate it here!”  _ Choke. “ _ It’s ugly and it stinks and you promised! No- no, no, don’t hang up on me, I’ll-” _

And it falls into place. There is a payphone by the bus stop outside of their building. It only takes dimes, and the paint is peeling. There are no dimes in the change jar on the counter. They’ve been going missing, recently. 

“ _ Please, i’ll be good.”  _ sniff. “ _ You won’t even know i’m there. Mama won’t even know I’m there, i’ll be-” _

His hand is on the window. There is acid in his throat, on his tongue, as he goes to slide the rusty latch under his finger and slide the window ever so slightly closer to…

“ _ Don’t forget me.”  _ She says. “ _ Please.” _

And the window is jammed. It won’t close. Wouldn’t, for all of this time. Too rusty. He takes his hands away, and stays there for a time so deafeningly long that he doesn’t feel it, doesn’t even notice himself shift from underneath the sheet and stand up.

“ _ Please.” _

The window wouldn’t close. 

“ _ I wanna go home.” _

The kitchen is still alive when he comes back down. Lights on. The fourth repeat of this album, track one, called  _ more than this. _ The tom yum is still lying cold and uncovered in the microwave. He heats it up on high for one minute and thirty seconds, and Misato has told him seven times at this point not to stare into the microwave while it’s doing it’s business, but so often it seems that there is too little too risk to care about microwaves and their cruel intentions. He puts a pot of coconut pu’erh on the stove and listens to a dead woman on TV tell him about a skincare product from 1982. Made with real melon.

And the window wouldn’t close.

The tea is done and the soup is maybe close to tolerable, to someone somewhere. They are put on a little pink plastic TV tray, and set for departure. He leaves the lights and the tv and the music before he goes up because sometimes it’s important to be reminded that life continues to exist, when you surface from a bout of crying on the street corner.

The tray goes to her bedside table, and Shinji goes back to his room, everything in it’s rightful place. He doesn’t hear her come up for a long time, but when he does, it is mysteriously easy to let go and crash into the sleep of a deserving person. He doesn’t ask her about it. He doesn’t ask himself about it. But he remembers, and he will remember for a long time, that he had tried to close the window. 

And in that, he knows himself a little better. 

  
  


**4:29 PM, Today**

It’s getting darker later and later these days. This is not an awful occurrence. When it is dark, the filth is allowed to rise up into the streets like scum from a pot of soup left unstirred for too long. Shinji is not quite scum, he thinks. But not exactly a carrot or a chunk of beef, either.

Still it’s nice. Nice that nobody can see that he’s wearing the same jeans he wore yesterday, and maybe the day before that if he’s remembering right. Anyhow, it’s 4:29 PM, December whatever-the-fuck, the eves of finals approaching; so who isn’t wearing the same clothes they wore yesterday? Who doesn’t stink of dry shampoo and jagerbombs? Who here isn’t making a part time job out of existing?

This is a slice of life in your twenties. “Things”, whatever those things are to you, are the emotional equivalent of a long dead squirrel stuck in the heating vent above your apartment. You can call your landlord, but he has a lot to deal with, and likely won’t get to it till next weekend or so. So you do nothing about it because you can’t. You sit and wait and everything is disgusting and unhealthily terrible, but it will be better next week. Maybe. Shinji thinks about that. He starts to wonder whether he is the dead squirrel or the man living beneath it. The analogy loses it’s grip on his head, and starts to feel more like excerpts from a badly written Chuck Palahniuk movie than normal sulky thoughts. 

He beats his brain over it until Toji calls. They shoot the breeze for a while. Useless talk. Boobs. Nerv. Bullshit.

“Coffee.” Toji says after a while, in reference to a possible cure for Shinji’s underwhelming yet still particularly bad hangover. “I’ll bring it. Go home, I’ll meet you there.”

“Nope.” Shinji says. “Internship, remember? I'm already late. Gotta' be at NERV in like ten minutes.”

“Like shit you do!” Toji is officially offended, and while Shinji isn’t sure what he’s done this time, he’s sure that it was nothing short of a dark scourge on the surface of their friendship. Oh god, no way in shit did you forget about tonight.”

And sometimes silence can be louder than people and poetry are willing to give it credit for.

“No the fuck you did _ not _ .” Toji spits, dearly holding onto the belief that constant and desperate verbal repetition will make it true. “Please set me straight. Please tell me I’m wrong.”

“Can’t do that.” Shinji says. “Very hungover. Very tired. Not super sure about what it is that you’re talking about.”

The groan that sounds from the other side of the line is tired, borderline pornographic (as is everything with this dude), and  _ almost _ real enough to induce guilt. He can physically feel their friendship deteriorating with it. It should, in theory, make him a lot sicker than it does. He is not surprised that it doesn’t.

“Come on, Shinji.” There are heavier notes of sad pleading in his voice than fiery anger. That stings sufficiently. 

“Return of The King comes out tonight. We preordered tickets like a month ago. We sat outside the theater with blankets. You took Asuka’s thermos without asking and she got all pissed off. We cut that girl in line while she was fighting with her boyfriend.”

That quiet thing happens again. Beyond phones and the remnants of an old friendship, the sun is folding into rippling sheets of lilac and bursting orange. It is so beyond them and any of their college kid issues. But somewhere he knows that Toji is watching the same thing, scrunching down his eyebrows real hard like he does. Somewhere he is thinking of hanging up.

“We brought snacks.” Toji tries, faintly and desperately. Shinji nods.

“Oh yeah.” He says suddenly, like he hadn’t remembered what he was pretending to forget from the moment Toji brought it up. He knows right then and there, and for the thirtieth time this week, that he is a very very bad friend. “No, I remember.”

“Good.” Says his friend, still not breathing relief, still not putting any stock whatsoever into the chance that this exchange will end without some flavor of emotional or existential confrontation. Haven’t all of their conversations ended up that way this week? Have they even  _ had _ more than three conversations this week? When did that become a normal thing?

“Be there in like, ten, then.” Toji says. “Think I left my ID in the atrium again, that  _ is _ , if I’m going with the assumption that Kensuke didn’t throw it away on accident again, which I’d _ very _ much like to-”

“I can’t, alright?.” Shinji attempts to nip this at the bud once again, and so this fraying relationship wilts a little closer to the dirt. Toji tries to say something else. It is not permitted. They are both sort of pissed in ways that they will bottle and store for later occasions. 

“I’m sorry, I just...You know I can’t screw around with this internship, you know that.”

“I know that, Shinji! I know that! Cause you’ve said like, I don’t know,  _ the last fourteen times  _ you’ve let your personal responsibilities slide in favor of taking prank calls from crackpots or licking envelopes, or whatever the hell it is that you do over there. What is it that you do over there?”

Like he wants to glorify that with an answer. He works. He gets up in the morning, and breathes, and barely feeds his responsibilities. He pisses off his friends. It isn’t the prettiest merry go round of activities, but it’s his own, and he knows how to ride it.

“Is it that guy?” Toji asks suddenly. “If it is, just tell me, shit.  I won’t be mad at you if it’s because of a guy, but I will be mad at you if it’s because of a guy and you don’t tell me.”

“ _ No _ , god, it’s-” And several things hit him, one after another, each harder than the last. “Wait, what guy? Hey, do you know what-...Oh fuck, nevermind, this is more important- have you heard from Asuka today?”

“So this is an Asuka thing?” He asks. “Yeah, I’m  _ definitely _ pissed off then.”

“No, Toji, I have to fucking go to work! This isn’t about anything! I just want-” At this point he just stops, because talking and walking can be difficult if you don’t know what the hell you’re doing with your life. “I just need to know if you’ve heard from her, if you’ve seen her in class or anything. It’s just now hitting me that I didn’t get her home last night.”

“That isn’t your responsibility.”

“Yeah, except for it is, and we both know that.” 

And Toji says  _ okay _ because he is giving up again. Like he has many times, and will many times again. 

“Okay.” He echoes himself. “Okay, no I haven’t heard from her. She wasn’t in ESL this morning, and she was still hanging around when I left last night.”

There is then this little bump in the conversation where Shinji is paying less attention to the phonecall, and more attention to the sidewalk. The benches, the dumpsters, any deep ditches that a pretty little heeled sandal might be sticking out of. Clumps of dirty copper hair, maybe, sticking out from under a garbage can lid.

It’s the sudden realization, that makes his sweat cold and his stomach sour. The realization that  _ someone _ may have had a more mysteriously wild night than he did. The jury is still out on that one though, because he kind of has to know what he did first.

“Oooh, that’s not good.” He says. “That...is  _ really,  _ really not good because- cause’ I woke up this morning to all these texts, and-and I haven’t even  _ read  _ half of them because if you think her vocabulary is vulgar when you _ haven’t  _ pissed her off-”

“Woah, woah, slow it down some. Go back a little bit. What did she send you this morning?”

“Just a bunch of these really, like downright  _ wrathful  _ texts, all alluding to me doing something or other that was really shity.” He picks up his pace. Late by at least five minutes. 

“-And the issue is that I literally could have spilled a drink on her shoes, or I could have shot her in the foot with an arrow and totaled her car in the same thirty minutes. And you know what? Her reaction would have been the same.”

“Likely the first one,” Toji coughs. “You’re not that cool.”

“I’m serious.”

“So am I! She overreacts, it’s just how she functions. I can’t believe this is the first time you’re realizing this. You probably just looked at her wrong.”

And while they are talking about the queen of dramatizing, it very well seems that the queen is absent from her throne, and so there is no way to consult her for the truth. In all likeliness, Toji is right. Somewhere there is an angry little goblin of a woman in pigtail braids purposefully missing calls and waiting for at least four people, possibly five, to make a physical appearance and beg forgiveness from the foot of her bed. Most likely.

But what the hell if she’s  _ not _ ? What then?

“I don’t know.” Shinji admits after a while. “If I could remember anything, anything at all, I would feel better about it.”

“You don’t remember anything?” A cruel, snorting chuckle. “Not a thing?”

“No…” He says. He is now tired, freaked out, and a few dozen leagues more suspicious of the person that he was last night. “Why are you saying it like that?”

“Go to work, idiot.” In that, Toji reveals that he only has about ten more seconds of patience to waste on this phone call. “Everything is fine. Call me if you change your mind about the movie.

And he won’t. But lying is never as painful as it was the last time, and it always slides off the tongue a little easier. So he smiles and nods to himself and it happens so easily.

“Maybe.” And they say goodbye.

By the end of the call the world is dark and rich and deep, cut by streetlights now and again, and a smattering of yellow windows that is suspiciously patterned. He is ten minutes late, thirty minutes by Misato’s standards. There is a lingering feeling of rot in his chest, stinging and aching and heavy with the knowing that he has only read one or two of those texts. And there are a  _ lot  _ of them. Like, a whole fucking boatload of hogwash that is neither coherent, nor very cheerful at a time like this. 

But she could be in a  _ ditch  _ somewhere.

So he reasons with himself. He can read one text. For now, just one. Just enough to carry his curiosity through the work night. He thumbs through the inbox and picks one at random. 4:35 AM. Text number eighteen out of twenty.

_ I trusted fuck you i fucking trusted you toodles bitch _

  
  


**8: 48 PM**

Not a lot of people know it, but Shinji works with his dad. 

Not that they should know, anyhow. They have hardly ever lived together, not that he cares to remember much about the time that they did. It doesn’t matter anymore. They are co-workers now, as his dad was at least gracious enough to squeeze him into an internship at NERV (which he and Asuka have lovingly dubbed it to stand for “Never Ending Regret Vacation”. In the adult world which they have yet to join, NERV is what the insiders call the Tokyo-3 Police Department Headquarters. Maybe somebody somewhere knows what it stands for, but Shinji is sure as hell without that knowledge.

It goes like this: most of his schooling is covered, the internship is (badly) paid, and the connection with NERV will have him on the force at the southwest precinct in a few years or so, as Misato puts it. The price he paid for this comfort was a father. It wasn’t a high price to pay. He has never missed him or felt his absence in anything heavier than the fleeting feeling of homesick he used to feel when looking into the mirror and watching the genes of a stranger. 

But it’s okay. He hates him, but it’s okay. It’s usually fine.

But ten minutes ago the copier machine was officially, and cordially fucked to all hell. The toner exploded, and with it it relentlessly took Shinji as a victim. Black ink? No. That might have been cool, might have made for a cool picture or something. It had to be fuchsia, and it had to tackle the entire left half of his face, and he had to wear a white shirt and khakis today, and his awkwardly distant, more-of-a-co-worker dad had to walk in right after the fact. Right at the climax, the post-coital, fuchsia stained five seconds after the largest slice of mondo-fuckery that he had endured that night.

They had looked at each other, or rather Shinji had looked at him, for about five seconds until that tiny chunk of social damage had become too much to endure.  _ Fix it,  _ his dad had said, and then he had picked up his copies and left. He always had been good at dipping out at the worst possible time.

And that had been the first word his father had said to him in four and a half months. And part of him, deep down there in his very deprived heart, had felt better having talked to him. Even for just a second.

Shinji takes the kind of deep breath that hurts you the whole way through. And he removes his jacket first, and then the shirt, which has taken most of the damage. Nobody ever comes into the copier room, anyway. Save for the interns. But it’s late, and it’s more than likely that he’s the only one on the clock tonight. 

But, lo and be-fucking-hold, the door behind him opens up again. And he is shirtless and splattered in pink, and not entirely workplace appropriate due to the fact that this wasn’t an 80s themed gay bar the last time he checked.

“I’m fixing it, okay?! Just give me a second to find the-”

“Woah.” Says the guy.

_ The _ guy. Shinji turns around to confirm, and confirm it he does. It’s definitely the guy. He’s in uniform this time, unlike Shinji, who looks like the leader of some sort of gay college kid tribe. 

And _ Kaworu _ . Because that’s his name, Shinji remembers now, is...yeah. Definitely in uniform. Business casual, but  _ casual-er _ if that makes any sense. Polo shirt twisted into a half tuck, royal blue. Part of his hair is pinned back, and under these hellish fluorescent lights you can tell so much more that there are no miles on his face.

_ Is this because of that _   _guy?_  Well shit, Toji. Maybe it is.

He sticks his finger out to point, to gesture to the mess as if Shinji wasn’t aware that it was there.

“Ink?” He asks.

“No.” Shinji answers, apparently on autopilot or something. A confusing few seconds it is before he corrects himself. “Yeah. Uh. Toner.”

And so begins the second and strangest meeting of Shinji and Kaworu the nighttime cryptid. There is a silent and magical agreement, in which Kaworu comes over and cracks open the front of the copier to let it air out. He stares at it for a long time.

“Yeah, I’ll tell you what it is.” He scratched at his head and doped about with the machine as if they didn’t have a plethora of weird shit to discuss. “Someone put the- Shinji, did you put the cartridge in here?”

“No.”  _ You remembered my name.  _ “No, it uh, think it might have been...I don’t know, wasn’t me.”  _ You remembered my name and this is the best I’ve felt in a week. _

“Mm.” He gets his hands in there, instantly muddying his hands with the same deep pink that has attacked Shinji’s chest in little speckles. He doesn’t even seem to care. “Well, whoever put the cartridge back in here did it like an idiot, and it’s all jammed up.”

He yanks it up in one swift, almost erotically clean motion.

“There.” He tosses the dirty pink cartridge into the waste bin, and that was that. He makes it look easy. Not just fixing the cartridge. “Good as new. Well, not really, but close enough.”

Just being.

“Looks like it got you pretty bad.” Kaworu observes, dusting the bulk of the powdery ink off of his hands before it dries. “Either that or you have a propensity for shirtlessness, but who am I to judge?”

If he’s  blushing at that, nobody would be able to properly tell. There’s enough pink covering his person to account for it, and distract from it if that isn’t enough. He throws on the hoodie, if nothing else than just to save Kaworu from the eventual blindness that could stem from being in a room with Shinji’s sunlight-neglected skin for too long. It is still dusted with, like some kind of strange snow, flecks of pink. It isn’t the worst he’s ever looked.

“This is really weird.” Shinji says. Wishes that there was at least some kind of elevator music space filler in here. “I’m sorry you had to see this.”

But Kaworu isn’t sorry. Or at least he doesn't give off the impression that he is. He is attractive enough, and oozing with the right kind of social charm that you don’t have to be lonely to eat up. He doesn’t have to be here. There are bigger and prettier things on every next corner, and to find them you only need keep walking and waving goodbye. But despite his advances, he always seems to stick. Even if only for the night.

So god help him, and find him somewhere just the smallest bit of confidence to wear on his sleeve. But shinji can’t help it when he continues to wonder  _ What is there for you here? _

“-Is that okay?” Kaworu says. It’s the end of a sentence. A sentence that could have been  _ anything _ , and now Shinji has to go along with it and pretend like he wasn’t just having an internal ted talk with himself, or admit defeat. And the clock ticks faster.

“Yeah, that’s cool.” He decides. “...Hang on. What? Sorry, I’m kind of...Only caught the end of that.”

“Long day?” He asks.

And Shinji does not answer  _ long life  _ for the sake of keeping up appearances.

“Yeah.” He nods. “Long day.”

“Well, I asked if you wanted help cleaning this up.”

“You don’t need to do that.” Shinji is waiting in secret for Kaworu to dotingly touch his arm and say  _ but I want to _ with eyes full of sober passion and the warmest hands. But he just laughs. That ugly,  _ cute _ ugly kind of laugh.

“Yeah, no, I definitely don’t.” He snickers, looking down into the bloody pink mess that will likely start to stain soon. “But neither do you. You didn’t put the cartridge in wrong. Leave it.”

“I can’t do that. My uh,...Chief came in like right after it happened and kind of caught me in the act.” He shakes his head a little. “So now if he comes back in and sees that it isn’t gone, i’ll be in hot water.”

“Hot water is what you could  _ use. _ ” Another little snort. “That stuff stains skin. Bad. And it itches, too. If you don’t get that off of you soon you’ll have to pressure wash that shit off of you.”

Confusion, acceptance, and then confusion again.

“How do you know so much about copy machines?”

“I was one in a past life.” He stretches his arms up and yawns.  And there would be just a little bit of stomach showing under that fancy polo (good? bad?) If he weren’t wearing an undershirt. Alas, there is only room for one skin showing idiot in this room. “Forget it. Come hit golf balls with me.”

“What?”

“Golf.” He says. “I’m bored. Golf balls. Come hit them off the roof with me.”

Shinji is by all accounts dumbfounded that that is a real thing, and not something dreamed up by teen-geared movie makers in the late 1980s. Not like this is the first time he’s been surprised by this guy. Or a little weirded out. A healthy mix, maybe.

“People actually do that?” Shinji asks. “That isn’t like...a fake thing?”

“I do it.” He says. “I do a lot of things. Get cleaned up. Come up if you want.”

And Then Kaworu is gone again, like he often is. Come up if you want. That’s what he said. Even if what Shinji heard was  _ I am the chance of a lifetime and you are going to ignore that because it’s all you know how to do. _

So he goes and he gets himself cleaned up before the machine. Not going to class tomorrow with faded, fat pink welts all over his body like a loved person might have would be preferable. Not to mention that it would itch, and he is  _ very _ susceptible to itch and allergy. Not to mention that Misato would ask a swath of suspicious questions, and answering  _ I broke the copier  _ would be a less than exciting answer to take to her. Not to mention that…

And by the time he stops listing things he is on the roof. Magically. For reasons. He is sitting down on cold concrete that he can just barely feel through thin jeans. Next to Kaworu, who would look almost dead lying there in the dark if that theory wasn’t disproved by the actual amount of life that you can feel radiating from him. Is it cheesy and stupid, to compare normal people to fallen angels in a year that isn’t 1994? Is it weird to think that he is just so _stupidly_ beautiful, splayed out peacefully over hard concrete like a radiant elven man might rest in a forest clearing? Is that weird?

_God_ yes, Shinji decides. Don’t think about that again. Weirdo. 

“No golf balls?” He asks, and Kaworu just kind of gives of a closed mouth chuckle. “What happened to that?”

“Dude, nobody really does that.” He elbows Shinji in the hip and manages to make it somehow a weirdly loving gesture. “I just said that to get you up here.”

“Why would you wanna’ do that?”

He shrugs, or as well as he can when laying on the ground. 

“You just looked like you needed a break, that’s all. I didn’t think you’d actually do it unless I told you that aliens were landing on the roof or something.”

Shinji laughs, unforced.

“Or golf?”

“Yeah.” He says. “Or golf.”

And there is a distinct absence of both golf and aliens up here. More an absence of golf, though. Aliens aren’t always little green men or horrific creatures with expanding jaws and an insatiable craving for blood. Sometimes an alien is a stranger, with soft looking hair and a personality like a bug zapper. And sometimes you are not zapped, not immediately. Sometimes you stay and you are comfortable in the quiet that used to strangle you, and you are okay with no stars in the sky. And the cold is endearing. And that is when you stop being careful. When you forget about being zapped and swim in the light because instant warmth is worth it in the end. Whatever it is.

But he looks to Kaworu again and so honestly feels that there is nothing to be afraid of. That maybe Shinji himself is the bug lamp or the alien. 

“Is your friend alright? The girl?” He asks, startling Shinji out of that trance. He hadn’t thought about that. Not for a bit. “You don’t have to talk about it though, if you don’t feel like it.”

“No, it’s cool.” _Is it cool?_ “I don’t know, actually. She’s kind of freezing me out and I have no idea why.”

A silence that the bugs have so kindly filled up for them. And a few cars, here and there. But quiet is hardly comfortable anymore. Not when you know that it’s still your turn to talk. He bites at a scarred flap of skin inside of his cheek. Dirty old habits.

“Would you...happen to know why?” Pause. “Not that I-...Not that I think you would, but…I remember parts of last night.”

_ Parts _ is the overstatement to rule them all.

“-And I remember meeting you. That you helped me take Asuka upstairs, and I saw you in the laundry room. But that’s kind of all of it.”

Kaworu still hasn’t spoken. Maybe he’s fallen asleep. Wouldn’t that be nice. A good alternative to him being too annoyed or weirded out to respond. Nevertheless, Shinji beats on.

“-And this morning….And-and this morning my housemate wakes me up, and she goes  _ you should apologize to that guy  _ or something. And I don’t know if that guy was you, but I don’t think it could have been either of my friends because we don’t really do apologies, so i’ve just been kind of walking around waiting for some guy to punch me in the throat for something I don’t remember doing. But that never happened, so i thought that maybe it was you.”

He swallows the sudden dryness. “Was it you? Did I do something to you?”

And there is a long, deep breath that winds into a tired bit of laughter that could only really belong to Kaworu. Shinii, as of instantly, is red all over. Again.

“Oh my god, it  _ was  _ you!”

“No, no, it’s fine.” But he’s still laughing, maybe with him instead of at him if that’s any consolation. “You were a perfect gentleman. I just found the address on your arm and walked you home, that’s all.”

Shinji looks down and sees that it’s still there. Her handwriting in faded washed up marker, which for all he knows could be the only thing he has left of her. As if he didn’t already look like a great big baby idiot.

“Oh, god.” He palms his face. “You didn’t have to do that, I’m sorry.”

“Oh, don’t worry about it. You stay sober at a party, you’re on take home duty. Those are the rules, I was well aware of that when I started.”

“No they’re not!” Shinji protests. “There are no rules. First rule of drinking.”

“Well I don’t drink, how can I be expected to know that?” He hits Shinji with the elbow move again, and at this point he begins to wonder if there’s something that he’s supposed to do in return. “You’re acting like I didn’t have the best time ever.”

The best time ever kind of sounds like the worst. In some senses, Shinji is glad that he wasn’t there for it. Not in spirit, anyway. But he has to wonder. He lays his head down finally, and stares into nothing at all, and he wonders about the night that he missed. What it must have been like, to have a good time. One of the only good times. And he doesn’t even remember it. Fitting.

“Why do I only ever see you at night?” Shinji asks. The million dollar question.

And Kaworu says, “I could ask you the same thing.”

“Yeah.” Shinji tucks his arms behind his head, and breathes in the unforgiving chill. “But can I ask  _ you _ something?” 

“I’ll allow it.” He says. “Just this once.”

And there is a lapse of time that is too heavy for even aliens or bugs or golf to be able to fill. Questions are hard. Talking is hard. The pieces of the words are in your head, and you know the endgame, but putting it together is just beyond it. How do you even say it? How does one alien communicate with another?

“What did I do to you?” He pushes it out. “What did I really do to you?”

The moment ruiner is out. The answer, if so it exists, approaches.

“Nothing.” He answers, too quickly and easily for Shinji’s liking. “Maybe it’s what I did to you.”

“Okay.” Now more nervous than he had originally thought to be possible, he takes this other route. “What did you do to me?”

And it comes so soft. So easily. 

“I wouldn’t let you kiss me.” He answers, without hesitation or conviction or really even a hint that he knows how human people work, or are programed to react to things. “That might have something to do with it.”

And the bugs get quieter, and quieter, and quieter, and quieter.  
  


 

**September, 1997**

The first brush with vulnerability is always the last. You let your guard down for even one second. You let yourself go to bed at night thinking that people are good, inherently good, and that there is a reason for every bump in the road and pebble underneath the wheel.

One wrong step, and that is gone. The worst part is that you are never the one making the step. 

They’re just some out of town punks looking for a rush and five minutes to feel infinite. Like god. Shinji will remember, years down the line, looking behind him on the walk home from school and feeling guilty for wanting to switch sidewalks. Thinking that they’re just some dirty looking teenagers, and assuming things about them, about  _ anyone  _ is wrong. So he stays on the sidewalk. It’s fine. It’s wrong to think that way. 

They take his backpack and a premolar tooth from the right side of his mouth. And they laugh at him the whole way. At the fact that he even  _ thought  _ to refuse at first. That he tries not to cry, but it isn’t  _ isn’t  _ working. They take his new shoes. And somehow that’s the worst part. The loss of dignity manifests itself in many ways. But in some way, he will for the rest of his life be a barefoot teenage boy with a bloody mouth walking home in fear. In some ways he will never get there.

But in real life he does get there. He forgets a lot of it. Blacks it out, partly in fear that Misato will make him recount it. And maybe he can get away with just telling her that they took his backpack. Not about the shoes or the backpack or the wallet or the crying or whatever else.

But he’s  _ still _ crying when he gets home, and there is a thought in his head that insists that it will never stop. That she’ll show up, and make it talk about it, and call the cops, and through the entire episode he will be crying and crying and crying and it will become too much to contain so they’ll just send him off to an institution and stick him in a soundproof room for the rest of his life. This is the future. This is what he has to look forward to. If it never stops.

But it does stop. Right when he gets through the door. Because of Asuka.

Because Asuka is there, and she’s doing her nails in front of the TV. And she isn’t an idiot. She knows. She is the kind of girl who can smell instability from a mile away, and probably blood if those vampire rumors are true.

She gets up. He chokes. She sighs like a middle-ages businesses executive would at the end of a lengthy day. In exactly two minutes she has him sitting on the toilet seat in a room of fog and hot water and that bloody smell. She doesn’t ask questions. She never will.

“Did you keep the tooth?” She asks.  He shakes his head. There’s still a risk that opening his mouth, or saying anything at all would start it up again.

“Hold this.” She transfers the icepack to his hand. He holds it over his cheek, where the worst hit occurred. She produces a glass of warm water from nowhere. “Gargle.”

So he does, but goddamnit he didn’t know there was  _ salt  _ in there. 

“Just do it.” She snarks as he grimaces in pain. Eventually he is allowed to spit out the pink, murky liquid as she hands him a cotton swab to wedge under his bleeding gums.

“Don’t let people do that to you.” She says. “You have to bite back.”

“I can’t.” An ugly, wet sniff. “I can’t do that, i’m not…”

“You have to.” She barks, and it echoes when it hits the mirrors and the walls. “Because it’ll happen again. It just does. People are mean. Gargle again.”

He does, afraid that his silence will give her more room to talk.

“You have to learn to fight it.” She says. “Even if it hurts worse than this does.”

He spits. She takes the ice pack off, presses a bandage to his bleeding temple. And for the first time of many, she feels sorry for him. It's in her face. She finally looks at him for longer than five seconds, and there is a world behind her eyes in which she understands this. And she does understand. He had always thought her so birdlike. In looks, and in nature, and the way that she eats. He had never thought to think, before now, what she was flying away from.

"You're okay." She says. "Stop crying."

 And then she is gone. And Shinji learns on this day, just how bad blood stinks. And the taste of salt and metal. How quickly the soft curves of innocence do sharpen, and prick you when you once fell onto them. And he knows, now and finally, that perfection is an image and not a person. She is not an untouchable concept in a yellow sundress. There is a scar below her right eye. She breathes.

And she closes the door to her bedroom and that is the end of it. But it feels worse than it ever had, and worse than it ever will. 

That he had tried to close that window.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this...is so late. Bur honestly for so long I didn't know what direction I was going with it, and I think I finally found it?? Thank you guys...so much for being as kind as you have, it seriously keeps me going ! T-T So basically this chapter is kind of wild, thank you so much for reading!

**10:34 AM:**

 

“As someone with an extensive knowledge of daytime true crime drama,” Misato clears her throat. Shinji is holding back the phrase _legal murder porn_ with the strength of a god. “Asuka has met one of two fates.”

Again. Taking any kind of advice from Misato is likely to turn up the same quality of answer as say, taking seven hits of acid and screaming for answers naked in the parking lot of a convenience store. At least _that_ option would expose him to some opinions that might actually be worth something. Some opinions that aren’t spat from the mouth of desperation itself, or as Shinji likes to call her, Misato.  But rock bottom embraces him, and he embraces it in turn. Good and tight.

“Okay.” So he bites. “Those answers would be?”

“She either hopped on a cargo plane to North America and ended up in Las Vegas with a new identity,” shrug. “Or she’s dead.”

And he wishes, so badly and passionately wishes, that he was not in the market to believe her.

“How dead?”

It’s then that she pities him. Just enough to drop the buddy-buddy roommate act and step into the shoes of a mother, however uncomfortable they are on her feet. She finds a spot next to him on the futon and snakes an arm around his shoulder. She knows that it’s making him uncomfortable. She doesn’t care. That just makes the whole mom act more realistic.

“Oh, honey.” She hums. “Asuka isn’t dead. She’s in a thing. Sometimes you’re in a thing,

Too.”

“What constitutes a thing?” Shinji scrunches his shoulders up all tight. Misato shakes her head, and at first the sounds of the city outside take the liberty of answering for her. _A thing_ around here could be anything and everything at all.

“Oh, you know.” She says at some point. “A thing. A funk. A conundrum. A conniption, if you will.”

“I won’t.” He picks up the tea she’s boiled up for him. Class: green. Too hot. Oversteeped. He sets it back down and quietly marks it down as beyond enjoyable consumption and hopes that she doesn’t notice. And she is a goddamn cat if she is anything. She slaps his knee and pushes it right back into his hands.

“What are we, a fuckin’ princess over here? Drink it up, sweets, you need your caffeine it sounds like.”

“You’re only supposed to steep green tea for two minutes.” He tells her. And she snorts, and oh god here comes the fucking thunder.

“Hey. Shinji. ‘Only’ is such a limiting word. And you should almost never use it, unless you’re writing a love song or ordering a sandwich.” She eagle-eyes the piss out of him until he takes a solid, real sip. At which point she smiles, and leans back into the sofa. “Good boy. You’ll feel better, you know? What’s that we were talking about?”

“Asuka’s gone.” He sips, the bitterness slapping him full on now. “For over a day now. She won’t answer my calls. My texts. I guess I could email her. Send her a fax, if her machine is still up…”

“And where is she gone from, Shin?” She crosses her legs, right over left. It starts to feel more like a mental health evaluation than a morning chat with Miss Kirin Ichiban 2003. “Her home? Where she lives without you to coddle her? We can’t keep tabs on her anymore, kid. She’s flown the coop. Flewn the coop? I don’t know. She doesn’t live here anymore. I can’t hold her hand and pray she doesn’t fall over the edge anymore.”

“I can’t believe I’m the only one who cares about this.” He marvels at it. Astonishment for one and a side of morning anxiety. “She could be bottoms up in a pond somewhere.”

“She isn’t.” She sips her own tea, the tea bag now having been there for a cool ten minutes. “I’m not ignoring the signs of certain death, I’m giving her some space. She’s probably embarrassed. Sounds like you babies had a rough night back there.”

And maybe they did. Nights can be rough. Historically speaking, nights can be rough. And days can be rough. But when days are rough it’s because you lost your favorite parking spot, or your team lost, or (god forbid) you got your lunch stolen from the break room fridge. The night is different. In the night, people fuck and they fight and they die and they live like spirits without bodies, bouncing from one great and terrible experience to the next. Nothing matters in the night. People go gone in the night.

Shinji swallows, all spit and tea and the taste of blood.

“I left her there.” He says, mostly just to himself. “I left her in the reject bedroom and went off with a guy while she could have choked on her own vomit. That’s how Jim Morrison died.”

“Oh, honey. It was Hendrix. That was Jimmy Hendrix that died that way... _Oh, honey_.” And it sounds more like bullshit every time she says it. She drops the tea thing and picks up a cigarette halve. She lights it up and blows big ugly slugs of grey right into his face. “If I had a fucking nickel for every time…”

“Screw off.” He slips his shoes on sock free. “I’m not like you.”

“Hey. Shinji? Sweetheart? Shut the hell up.” She says, wrinkling up her nose like she does when her patience slips past the due date. She leans forward and flexes her shoulders, stretching all of the little muscles in her back. Her chin kisses her knees, and her hair spills out over her shins like a great fucking river or something cute like that. She has thoroughly checked out at this point in time.

“If you’re so worried about it, check up on her. In person. Call the cops.”

“You _are_ the cops.”

“I am! I am the cops!” She groans. “So are you going to listen to _Shinji Ikari_ , or are you going to listen to a real- wait, that came out wrong.”

Misato comes back to life then, equally slowly and hesitantly. She grips his shoulders with her witch’s talons and truly, dearly believes that shaking him around like that is providing some sort of comfort.

“You should _always_ listen to Shinji Ikari. Always and always.” She preens at his hair, only kind of making it worse in the long run. “But mostly you should listen to me, because I _am_ right about this. Asuka is fine. She’s mad at you and she sent you some nasty texts and it isn’t the end of the world.”

“Since when does something have to be the end of the world to be a bad... _really bad_ thing?” He stands up now, unable to be near her and simultaneously unable to be away. He stands by the little window where the pigeons nested last summer. Watches the spot in the corner of the old brick sill that lint and twigs and bird shit are still clinging too. Even pigeons will leave you.

“I’ve always hated that.” A sigh. “If Asuka _died_ it wouldn’t be the end of the world as a whole, but it would sure fucking suck, and I would probably look back and wonder how long I’d spend standing around drinking bad tea while she wondered whether anyone was looking for her.”

“You sure have become morbid in your old age.” Unable to see her, Shinji can almost feel Misato winking. “You get that from me?”

 _Yes_ , he says internally, thinking that it was among the worst gifts he has ever received. And that he would sure like to return it to her, and to his father, and to maybe-dead Asuka, and the school board, and NERV in general, and every last person who has looked at him wrong since Tuesday. So maybe in that, it was not her gift to give him.

Being sad and angry is not a funky trend passed around in coffee shops, nor is it a present wrapped up in red foil that your father gives to you to someday pass onto your own sad and dirty kids. It’s a product of experience. It’s chemicals and neurons, it’s an almond shaped mass in your head called the amygdala that dictates what you fear, and how often. It’s college. It’s forgetting the question, or ignoring it, or just not answering. You are a cut phone line. You hang up, and you only hear yourself.

“I don’t know what to do.” He says.

“And I don’t know what to tell you.”

That’s the end of that, as far as he is concerned. Maybe he never really wanted her help in the first place, but it’s clear as crystal now that he isn’t getting it, or any form of it beyond soft words and gentle pats. Shinji gives up just a little bit, but not all the way. The pigeons have been gone for over a year now. Maybe it’s time to clean out that nest. But there’s always the hope that they’ll come back, or that maybe a different family of them will. It isn’t easy to find a safe place in the city, warm but shaded enough to feel secure. Maybe some pigeons should be grateful. Grateful that they’d ever found a place like that. So is it the pigeon’s fault for leaving, or the nest’s fault for growing less warm over time?

“Then don’t tell me anything.”

A familiar hairline pops up around the street corner, and Shinji would brush it off as maybe a familiar stranger if it weren’t for the wayfarer sunglasses. It’s winter for fucks sake. And for _shits_ sake, too! Who else would wear birkenstocks in forty degree weather? Who else but the straightest man with the gayest walk in the world?

“Was Toji supposed to come over this morning?”

“If you keep talking to me like I’m your secretary, I’ll start talking to you like you’re my maid. Which, by the way. The kitchen? Disgusting.” Her doing. “If you aren’t going to class or wading through the ponds to find Asuka’s body, clean it up maybe.”

No time to reprimand her for snorting around about something that stands a fair chance of becoming solid fact. Shinji accidentally feels himself up in the quest to determine whether or not he’s wearing pants as Toji turns the right corner. The chance of coincidence grows cold. And Shinji is in fact, wearing pants. No way out of this one, lest he throws himself from the porch and adds another notch to the list of bodies that Misato is going to have to explain to the 5 o’clock news.

“He’s coming here.” Shinji’s eyelids droop low. “He has no other business on this street.”

“So?” She’s smoking again. He can smell it. Maybe it’s the same cigarette from before. “That’s bad? You really are a case, Shinji. Your friend comes to visit you and you whine at the windowsill like an elderly cat. It’s your day off. No school, no work. You know, you could go and spend time with your friends instead of sitting inside and crying about how frayed your relationships with them are.

“I could.” Shinji admits, with little to no intention of actually doing it. “I could definitely do that, yes.”

Toji turns a right. Trips over the icy patch where the sidewalk melds into the street, like he does about a third of the time now. He watches the words _fuck you_ leave his lips and give no one in particular the what for as he continues to mutter his way towards the stoop, hands miles and miles into khaki pockets. Shinji flares his nostrils and puckers up his eyebrows. Disgust, however watered down.

“He’s coming up the stairs.”

“God help us, how will we go on.”

“Maybe he’s just here to chat.”

“What else would he be here for, Shinji?” And that’s the big ticket question. She doesn’t even know how right she is. He doesn’t even know what she’s right about. What else would he be here for? What is there to fear? What’s the big worry? Gonna’ kick open the door with his pricy cardboard shoes and holler _c’est la vie_ and send out a spray of bullets that tacks them both to the wall? Not likely, so what’s the next worst thing? Genuine human interaction? Shinji isn’t a huge talker, but he isn’t _that_ pathetic. So what’s the middleman? What’s the happy medium of dreaded circumstances?

“We had plans yesterday.” He mumbles. And fear burns the pit of his stomach black. “I canceled.”

“Oh god.” A pause, and maybe some kind of understanding. “Hide.”

Because social anxiety, even in the presence of those dearest to you, might not be a concept that she can fully snug her fingers around, but flaking out? Making a cute little hobby out of flaking out? That she knows like the back of her hand, and the smell of Clinique, and yada-yada whatever. She’s off of the couch faster than she will ever be.

“Three seconds. Four at most, but definitely less than five.” She wagers, knotting the ties to her bathrobe. Shinji joins her by the door to peep out of the hole, but she juts out an ankle to warm him off with.

“What?? Three seconds until what?!” Maybe he _does_ have a gun. Toji is relatively predictable, and a move like that wouldn’t really fit in with his prescribed mojo, but hey. This _was_ return of the king that Shinji missed.Oh, you know. Final chapter to the biggest thing of all things, period.

“Just hide.” She hisses. Then all of the sudden he’s under the coffee table, a flurry of arms and legs and prescription medication caliber thoughts of hopelessness and despair. Shinji looks up at Misato for approval or something. Misato herself looks back down at him and in this order, weighs out the consequences of murder, goes through the five stages of grief, and asks herself, truly asks herself, how she is still capable of experiencing surprise in this fucking house. And all before the knock at the door.

But only once. Toji only ever knocks once before barrelling into the room like an elven warlord, or (and this one is less realistic), a man with a purpose. Misato, on account of this being her goddamn house and home and castle, doesn’t budge from the doorway. He looks even stupider than he did through the window, which somehow makes sense without an explanation.

“Well. Good morning.” He thus begins the daily reign of terror. Misato uncrosses her arms just to make a show out of crossing them again.

“It would have been.” She snips, and _bang_ , turns around in a flash of leg and sideboob, she is tarting off down the hill to stew and smoke and canive for the rest of her morning off.

“He’s under the fucking table.” She barks down the hall. And the door slams, sputtering shut as Toji sinks about one thousand leagues into his dirty little shell, jumping back a little. She pours herself a whisky, neat, and unseen by them as her role in the situation at hand comes to a quiet end for now.

Toji shrugs off the tension shoulder by shoulder, finally tossing his head down to peer underneath the table on the off chance that she wasn’t just fucking with him about the table thing. And baby, life is certainly a wild one. Toji gives into the familiar pull of confusion, but acceptance too. It narrows his eyes and heavies his chest with the gentlest sigh.

“Whatcha doing.” He asks. Shinji pretends not to see him for exactly three more seconds until he remembers how old he is.

“Me?” Buying time, maybe.

“Mhmm.” Toji, slow and condescending.

“Oh.” The cat is formally out of the bag, though still under the table. “Lost a contact, obviously.”

“You don’t wear glasses.”

“Because I wear contacts,” Shinji tries. Still from underneath that smudgy glass coffee table, it should be added. Glass, he thinks. Contemplates death in one million different languages. _Glass fucking coffee table, idiot._

“You have your dad’s eye color, but not his shitty vision. The rest is mom.” Toji kicks his shoes into a corner, and they clunk the floor three times before coming to a stop. Then there’s quiet to suffer again. But never the question of _why do you know that about me?_ A fruitless question about a friendship where new bananas stopped growing a long fucking time ago. There’s nothing new to know, nothing new to ask.

So what do we not run out of, as humans, if surprise and food and money are at a forever limited quantit? What is there left to spin? What, besides breathing and rolling our eyes and thinking nasty little thoughts, is there left for us to do on average one hundred times per day?

“You’re right.” Says Shinji. “I uh. Realized earlier that I’ve sat on this floor probably...upwards of two hundred times or something crazy like that, and I’ve never sat under the coffee table. Not once since I’ve been here. I mean, I’ll try anything once.”

“Liar.” Toji shuts the door. It’s just them and the world and the space between the coffee table and the door. The whirring _bzzt bzzt bzzzzzt_ of Misato’s electric lazer. God, does he hope it’s the electric razor. But it’s then that he backs out of his little turtle home and brushes the dust from his brow.

“You can’t even spell liar.”

“I’m not here for an english lit lecture.”

Shinji stands up and ticks the heater on, in hopes of making it known that hey, he’s going to be here for a while. And the old radiator clunks on with a nasty gurgle that slaps through the walls, as if to let this entire neighborhood know just exactly where the buck stops in this household. It will rain soon. There’s no way it couldn’t. Not with the way it smells outside.

_Bzzzt bzzzt bzzzt._

“I should hope they aren’t teaching you how to spell ‘liar’ in english lit.” Shinji takes the sofa. Kicks his feet up on the arm rest just to pepper it in that he _really_ isn’t planning on leaving. “Are they? You’re taking english lit, right? That’s just composition, right?”

“I’m not here for a lecture on whatever the fuck you’re going on about, either.” Hasn’t moved an inch out of the doorway, except to close it. Not a _half_ an inch. Is this something to worry about? Approximately how long ago should Shinji have made a run for it?

“Alright.” Shinji tries. “What’re you here for?”

And he’s quiet. Very quiet, for a man with a reputation for barging in at 3am to loudly spoil the latest Xfiles episode. In part, Shinji thinks that why Misato makes herself scarce when Toji comes over. It’s probably a lot easier to just avoid someone than it is to clean their blood out of your yves saint laurent handbag (side note: regardless of whether or not it’s genuine).

So it’s very unlike Toji to make a ghost of himself like this. To come unannounced, as dreaded tradition would predict, but go on  to do nothing but stare emptily down the hall? And he _is_ staring. It’s an unspoken rule to them, that eye contact is weird and best kept for drunken nights on the outskirts of town. But the feeling can’t be shaken; Toji’s eyes don’t always look like that. Do they?

“Oh hey, I…” Shinji says, his voice burning out halfway through the sentence. “You know, I...I really didn’t wanna’ miss the movie last night.”

Is it any surprise that he’s still not talking? Shinji scratches the back of his neck just to do something with his hands.

“I’m just- I am so on their last nerve down there.” On their last _nerv_ , more like. Hardy-har-har. “And Misato keeps being like ‘what happened to earning that paid internship we talked about?’ and everyone- everyone and their mother knows I’m not gonna’ get it, but she’s just dangling it over my head like that, like if I just put in a little more work down there than I could…I don’t know.”

He turns over to evade the sharp wash off morning light that the window lets in. Cheek pressed against the dirty florals of the worlds scratchiest corduroy sofa. A deep breath, and he feels no cleaner. Feels bad. And oh, is it so disgustingly quiet. Not even the crows will touch this god awful morning.

“No.” Shinji says. “No, I’m not gonna’ make excuses, we bought those tickets months in advance and you probably had to go alone- or worse, just with Kensuke, and I’m really sorry, _you’re my best friend and i love you_ , please don’t kill me.”

Maybe a fair and just killing would be the right thing to do, actually. Shinji remembers being young, either thirteen or fourteen but no older, enduring some sort of story that ended in the following anecdote; Toji Suzuhara knew how to find that spot in your neck that could kill you instantly if you so much as pinched it between your thumb and pointer fingers. He’d never believed it. Nobody did.

It was called the chopstick method. And they said, behind bathroom doors and under desks, that he had used it before, and that he would use it again.

But it is neither here nor there. Just a stale old grade school rumor. And if it were true, Shinji was sure that Toji wouldn’t have been near as proficient as he had been back in the day. Quick and painless is a relatively stiff goal to shoot for as far as murdering goes, and likely an easy one to botch. And anyhow, how selfish would it be to ask your best friend to kill you? And this close to a friday, nonetheless. No, dying would have to wait. Too much paperwork to file.

“Toji, would you yell at me already.” More of a command than a request. “Or kill me. Or go home?”

And when he finally opens his mouth to talk, Shinji sits up at attention like he is ready to accept any of those three options with love and open arms and love again. Anything for him to put this to fucking bed, and maybe lift something off of both of their plates.

“We’re not talking about that right now.” Toji barks quietly. His voice doesn’t usually cut like that. He whips out his pointer finger and brandishes it at Shinji like a loaded weapon. “And we _will_ talk about it, but not right now.”

Okay. So is that bridge burnt, crossed, or are they just kind of taking a boat across the river instead?

“Sure.”

“Good.”

“Yeah.”

There comes a suspicious lack of action or spoken word or really anything at all. Is there any other way to say ‘awkward silence’? Is that really a grand enough definition to sum up this specific brand of fuckery? What the hell is this? What is the point? What could possess someone with a mostly working brain to wear sandals in the season of ice and death and the devil himself?

Shinji’s breath hitches because at first he’s going to say it, and then he decides that he’d really better not. And then he does it again. And then he’s forming words and eulogies and the question under his tongue is written in stomach acid.

“Is she dead?”

Two seconds. Ten, fifteen, deep breaths, the suspicious smell of summer sweat in the dead of winter. Toji does not exhale and maybe he never will at this point.

“I was hoping you could tell me.”

 

 

**3:30 AM, The Night Before Last:**

“Who are you? Who the hell are you?”

A nameless face. The physical embodiment of one of those weird boy handshakes that turns into a pat on the back and a hug. The Adonis of urbania, the patron saint of uncomfortable thoughts. He is somebody’s home. There’s no way he could not be.

“I’m Kaworu Nagisa.”

Above all, an enviable statement. _I’m Kaworu Nagisa_. Might as well be doing finger guns and winking.

“I know about you.”

“Thanks.” And for a long time that’s just how it is. They’re just standing there, cold and wet and better off dead, each with a different 2003 hot 100 stuck in their head. And there are a million things to look at out here. So why look at each other?

And oh, it’s too late for the buses to be running. No money for the subway, and home is somewhere that is very much not here. For the sake of not getting into a five-minute long mental gymnastics match over what you should _really_ call your home, Shinji deduces this. Bottom line; bed is very, very far away. When you factor in walking time, and the whole drunken jelly legs thing? An hour and a half. Two hours, worst case scenario. Maybe three if they get lost.

His legs buckle almost immediately.

“Coffee!” Kaworu chirps, picking Shinji up by the hood of his jacket. He says everything like that, in a voice that is neither entertained nor irritated with you. It’s nice. “That’s what you need. You like coffee, Mr. Ikari?”

Shinji can’t muster the brain power to like much of anything right now. He likes existing, and not falling over, and the way that having a blood alcohol content of 0.31 makes him feel. Like his legs are borrowed. Like the gentle, wavering pull of consciousness might finally snatch him away and take him somewhere brand new. But it never does. And maybe that’s the fun of it.

Because he can’t say in all certainty that he would prefer to leave right now.

“I like coffee. Coffee doesn’t like me.” Shinji informs the general public, his sloppy words starting to run into one sentence at this point. “In one end and out the other. It makes me-“

“Hohohoh, okay- We’ll get you a small, then. A small never hurt anyone, right? Medium is the cut off, I think. You’ll be fine, it’ll be fine.”

Kaworu pats him on the back. For whatever reason, that makes Shinji feel like he’s allowed to not walk anymore, and before Kaworu can get a chance to process anything, or construct a game plan, Shinji is plummeting to his knees again, tasting a familiar sourness in the back of his throat.

The last three drinks were bad ideas. The medicinal rice krispy treat courtesy of Kensuke’s weird mother didn’t help much, either. Being drunk is a lot like going to church. Everyone thinks they’re fine until the drugs kick in. Trademark, Asuka Langley Sohryu, 1999. Shinji will never know what she means by that.

Kaworu catches him under the arms. With one swift heave, he swings him easily back up to planet earth, or at least to his feet. Fucking immaculate. Without flinching.

“Shit.” He hisses, but he’s sort of laughing. Shinji struggles to remember whether he’s heard him swear before.

“Oh. Oh god, uh. Alright. This is fine. Shinji, you’re gonna’ have to work with me here, okay? You remember how to move your feet? C’mere, it’s like dancing. I’ll show you. Hold onto me, yeah? Nope, other arm. Yep, good! Sweet. It’s like this. One, two, one, two, one two, one and two…”

It isn’t like dancing at all.

“One, two, three, four.” Shinji tries.

“Nope, just two. You only got two feet, buddy. Are you gonna’ throw up again?”

“No.” But his tongue feels too large to fit comfortably into his mouth, and if lying has a taste then this might just be the flavor of the month, baby. Kaworu slows their studied swagger of a walk.

“Do you wanna’ try?” He asks, politely as can be. “Might make you feel better.”

“Shut up, okay?” A bitter few seconds. “Shut up. Could you please just shut up and count again?”

“Mhm.” He doesn’t sound hurt. It’s likely that he’s used to this. Nobody is this good at rearing the drunk like infant sheep. Not on their first round of it. “One, two, one, two, one, two.”

“One, two, one, two...one, two.” And his feet fall into something that, in scant lighting or another universe, you could call a rhythm.

They chant like that together for a long time. The street is barren of anything but ones and twos and shuffled movements. Four feet, no music, and a little dance called walking. Before long they’re saying nothing at all. He’s catching on. Kaworu is shouldering less of the burden now. Carrying one and a half people instead of two, which is at least a minor improvement. They’re the worst dancers on this side of the city; at least in this narrative. The street is slick with oil and water and the sweet whispering promise of a cracked tailbone, if they so much as get a step or two off.  The streetlights begin to tick off one by one by one.

“Uh oh.” Shinji.

“Shit.” Kaworu. Two for two on the dirty mouthing.

“Oh man, that is...That is not prefer-ble.” Shinji manages to garble. “I- Man, I do not have a very good sense of direction.”

“Aww, what’s a little darkness?”

“A lot of things.”

“Hmm. Well, I can’t much argue with that.” They pick up the slack to keep up with the dying streetlights. “However, it’s nothing I- nothing _we_ can’t handle. I could sniff out the nearest coffee shop in this city if I were hog-tied and blindfolded. And you best believe me when I say I would roll there if i had to.”

“Ya like coffee that much?”

“I have to.” Kaworu answers. “I can’t drink. I don’t know any Latin. Something on this green earth of ours has to make me quirky and interesting enough for you to like me.

“Coffee is good for you in moderation.” Shinji says, but forgets to say _I think I already like you_

 _“_ So is everything.” Kaworu sniffs. “You could moderate your cocaine usage and some guy in some corner of the world with a PHD in whatever will tell you it’s the latest anti-aging miracle treatment.” But he might have said, _how much?_

And Shinji says nothing. But he could have said _I don’t know yet._

They’re passing the underside of an empty highway overpass when Shinj tells Kaworu that he’s never done cocaine. That he has no cocaine usage to moderate. And Kaworu explains that no, he hadn’t expected so. Just an example. Shinji figures that asking Kaworu whether he’s done cocaine before would be kind of a garbagey thing to do to a guy you just met.

“Have you ever done cocaine?” But _well._ When you pile more garbage on to preexisting garbage, what are you really ruining?

You can see it in his face; he wasn’t expecting that. Or maybe he was waiting for it. He scrunches up his nose all funny. His eyebrows pucker together in what can only really be called a friendly cringe. He’s uncomfortable now, in a small dose. He’s quiet. He’s going to answer it and he’s going to tell the truth because beautiful men can get away with murder and miles beyond it.

“On my nineteenth birthday.” So he tells, “I was alone in Amsterdam. They let me abroad to study classical art history, and it was actually pretty cheap compared to everywhere else the other programs had to offer. And I went. And my little group left me, and I met a man named Erick or Heinrich or something like that at a little after hours cafe. He was this sweet younger guy, a lot older than me, but sweet. He had a patch over one of his eyebrows where the hair didn’t grow in quite right. Maybe an accident or something, but I didn’t ask.”

The quiet grows rich and full and tolerable. Breathing prohibited.

“ _Aaaaand_ then...exactly what you think happened. And we kept in touch for seven months, at which point he decided to tell me that he had a wife and kids and a dog and that the shit he’d given me was cut with drywall. So that was my experience with cocaine.”

What does one say to that? How does one respond besides _oh,_ or _that’s interesting,_ or _were you in love with him,_ or _did he love you too?_

Depends on how smart you are, Shinji supposes.

“Bull-fucking-honkey.” Shinji spits, and every last word is a full sentence. “That never happened.”

He doesn’t expect Kaworu to be offended because he absolutely knows that he’s right. And he so absolutely fucking is. Kaworu Nagisa of the beautiful people rings in the hour with the loudest bout of laughter that he has graced the streets with yet. It’s kind of ugly. You can’t not fall in love with it.

“I didn’t even get you for one second? How the hell did you know?”

“Because.” Shinji scoffs. “Classical art is greek art, like, ancient pottery and busts and shit. Why would you go to Amsterdam to study _greek art_? And if you fell in love with some foreign whoever, wouldn’t you remember his name?”

“Who said I fell in love with him?”

“You didn’t.” Shinji rolls his eyes, and expertly so for someone as not-there as he is. “He isn’t real. Tell me the real story.”

“It’s not very interesting.” Kaworu muses. “It was still my birthday, but-”

“Are you _sure_ it was your birthday-”

“...Maybe the night before? _Damn_ , you’re good.” Something he could get used to hearing under the right set of friendly circumstances. “I must have been turning eighteen, so...I was seventeen, I guess. My cousin took me to his girlfriend’s party and I was definitely too young to be there and some girl gave me coke and I thought I was cool enough for it, and basically I locked myself in the bathroom and pissed my pants and cried myself to sleep, and when I woke up I was eighteen and they called me toilet man for like three years. Not even creative.”

Shinji blinks a few times.

“That one was real.” He says.

“Yeah.” Goes coke boy. “Yeah, it was.”

“Huh.” Shinji bites at his thumbnail and takes a few notes. “Never again?”

“ _God_.” Kaworu coughs. “Never again.”

It feels like beating a game. And not only beating a game, but winning something out of it. Is that a cruel thought? Is it totally gross to be a little giddy when someone a lot hotter and a lot more socially competent than you, is revealed to be average? When the silken curtain is thus ripped from the rods to expose to you the fraud, nay, the village fool known as toilet boy? How mean is that? Scale of one to ten?

“You sure can spot a lie at the drop of a hat. Guess that’s why you’re in good boy cop school.” Kaworu snickers. “Where’d you learn that?”

“My best friend.” Shinji gives a hard exhale through the nostrils. “She’s a pathological liar and she’s not very creative. Not very smart, either. She’s very tiring, and quite frankly i’m um, i’m done with her very much for the time being. She’s a Sagittarius with a capricorn moon and an ascendant scorpio and she tells me that all of the time but i’ve never known what it means. She’s pretty much the reason I’m a developing alcoholic and can’t trust women. I’ve been in love with her for for seven years.”

Kaworu is silently alarmed for him as of this moment in time.

“I don’t want to embarass you, but you said ‘very’ a grand total of four times right there, friend.”

“So arrest me.” Shinji tries to break free, and mentions something about wanting to climb a wall over there “just to see if i could”, but is very politely but firmly told that that is not about to fucking happen. So he stays there still, under the warmth of a weird stranger’s arm and the smell of cigarettes on a denim jacket that may or may not say Tommy Hilfiger on the back. He’ll have to check that later.

“I very much could.” Kaworu. And there are the finger guns. Like clockwork. Beautiful, mystical clockwork.

“Shut the hell up.” Shinji chokes on the stupid joke and accidentally spits a little in his effort to chide the shit out of this guy. “You are so fucking rude okay, I don’t even know you, you could be a serial killer with a picture of me in his underwear and a knife jabbed into my side, and I wouldn’t even know it until you cut into me because this jacket Asuka bought for me is so fucking padded, she _knows_ I hate down.”

“Haha. Gross.”

“I don’t care what you have to say about me. What-so-ever.” Pops every syllable. “So suck on it and be mean to be and act like a normal human being already, you psuedo-David Byrne freak.”

“Anybody ever tell you you talk too much?”

“Shut up and buy me a fucking coffee.”

  
He buys him four. The first one was fine, and definitely needed and all, but going for the second one was a fucking pipedream, or it should have been at least. The third was suicide. The fourth cup of coffee was cause for the list of the top 5 worst nights of his life, which Shinji would come to organize some time in the future.

Kaworu has a black coffee and two pieces of apple pie and a deathwish freshly granted. They all pretty much just taste like fear.

“You have to eat this.” Kaworu whispers, in something other than that coolboy teen soap opera voice for once. He’s only twenty percent panicking right now, but he’s also not very good at math or experiencing unsavory emotions. “Eat this pie. God, eat this fucking pie, please do this one thing for me, I have been kind up until now but you have to eat this pie, you have to chew it and you have to swallow it. Shinji.”

“I don’t like cinnamon.” Shinji jerks back in his booth as Kaworu maneuvers across the table again to try and fork it down his throat. “Stop-STOP, you will have to kill me first. And i’m fast. You haven’t seen me run.”

“That’s awesome.” Kaworu mutters into his hands, massaging at his roots with the pads of his fingers.

“Do you want to see?”

“Shinji.” He hisses. “Do not get up and do that again.”

“Stop  trying to feed me pie.” He crosses his arms and cocks his head to one side, fingers tapping expectantly all the way along. He’s bargaining and he knows that he’s going to win.

“You...You have to eat something.” He begs.

“Then die.”

Shinji has never been this problematic in his life. And it is absolutely intoxicating. Saying no is liberating. Saying no three hundred and sixty times is crack in it’s purest form. Good crack. Damn good crack.

And Kaworu is a person afterall, it looks like. There are miles on his face from this night. He’s used to staying up this late, but maybe not out this late, or at least not this far away from home. And with some random drunk dude from a sorority party who cried at least once this night and told a story about pickles that will be only be called iconic for generations to come.  It’s a taxing experience. Perhaps enough so to crack snow white’s little glass coffin. _That’s you, Kaworu._

But then he’s laughing. Hysterically. There are tears in his eyes.

“What.” Shinji asks. The corner of his mouth drags up into a confused smirk. “What are you laughing at, toilet boy.”

But it doesn’t shut him up. If he’s angry, it doesn’t show.

“Oh my god you are such an asshole.” It’s like he’s just realizing it. Shinji looks down at his hands as if to ask them why, why he didn’t know it sooner. “I can’t believe I let you kidnap me and fill me with caffeine and small talk so you could bully me to death in a small gimicky diner.”

“You don’t like the stuffed animals on the walls or whatever?” Kaworu shakes his head. “You’re the only one. Last time I take you to a cafe for inner city part-time goth kids.”

“Last time you take me anywhere, bitch.” Shinji makes his arms like a basketball players, and shoots for an invisible hoop. “What you gonna’ do about it.”

Kaworu is at a loss for air.

“Stop it! Stop it, you jerk!” Shinji lays down the thunder for the second time in his life, maybe, and smacks Kaworu on the bicep. “You and Asuka both! Why don’t you go be her drunk buddy so you can both laugh about how lame my haircut is or how stupid my laugh is or something.”

“Well, neither of those is true, so.” Quiet for a second. And for once tonight, that is excruciating and rare. “She tell you your haircut is lame?”

“No. No, I mean, she just- She kind of does this thing where-”

“It’s not lame, Shinji.” Kaworu stirs absentmindedly at his cup of coffee. “Your laugh isn’t stupid. I’ve heard a lot worse. Look at where we work.”

“Okay, well she knows what she’s talking about.” Shinji prods at the piece of pie, disgusted by it before Kaworu can get the chance to hope that he’ll take interest in it. “And it is kind of dumb. I’ve had the same haircut since High School."

“So have I.”

“No, you haven’t.”

“You know what? Maybe so.” Kaworu claps his hands together. “But yours fits you. It’s your thing. Own it. Tell her to fuck off.”

“Okay.” Shinji mutters, pulling his phone out of his jacket pocket. Kaworu goes a lovely shade of white. Panic levels rising rapidly. We have confirmation; they are at seventy percent.

“N-No.” He stutters. “No, no do not do that, Shinji, put your phone away right now.”

“She’s not answering.” Shinji frowns, and Kaworu whispers a series of small prayers. “Wait- wait, hello?”

What luck they were offered when Asuka was too drunk to answer the phone is solemnly ripped away from them with the introduction of a small, groggy voice on the other side of that line. Kaworu tries to grab for the phone once, and when the hand of Shinji smacks down upon his hand with the wrath of god, they lock eyes. The cafe is full. He is not the one in the worst condition.

So where is god? Not here. Not in this diner tonight.

“Hey Asuka, were you sleeping?” He nods understandingly. “Oooh. Okay. Gotcha. Fuck you, you stupid asshole idiot.”

Kaworu covers his face with his hands and groans loud enough to stir the group behind them. It looks like they understand.

“N-No, you’re gonna’ let me talk because if you don’t I’ll just block your number and put your prada bag in my toilet. Yeah. Yeah, I do have it, you left it in my room. What? No, your Birkin is in the bathroom. Because you never pick up your shit when you leave it here! Can I talk? Can I fucking talk?”

“Shinji-” Kaworu tries again. He just gets a _talk to the hand_ signal, and Shinji is already getting up to wander. Kaworu is not far behind.

“I’m not happy with you.” Shinji hisses into the speaker. “I’m not proud of what you’ve become and this friendship is not rewarding for me anymore and I’m starting to think that it never was. You make me want to drink and your houndstooth prada skirt is horrendous.”

Kaworu chokes on a gasp.

Even he knows that this is a particularly low blow. Hell. _Especially_ he.

“And- you never let me fucking talk, just shut the fuck up, for one second of your doped up MTV show of a life. You know who I’m with? I’m with Kaworu Na...Kaworu, what’s your last name?”

“Johanesburg.” Kaworu tries. “Kaworu Johanesburg.’

“He’s lying.” Shinji explains. “I’m here with Kaworu from the party who you thought was hot, and guess what? He’s gay _and_ he doesn’t like you. So how does that make you feel, huh? Low? That people are trashing you behind your back because they have little to no respect for you? Like you make me feel every time I so much as use the wrong turn signal, or wear cheap shoes, or make a joke at a party? How does it feel? Because I love you, Asuka. I can pretty much guarantee that I love you the most, out of anyone in the fucking world, because your parents are assholes and you push away everyone else. I would die for you, and-and I would kill for you, and I still would. I would still die for you. I still love you, you dumbass! And you’re making me say these things!”

Shinji reaches the jukebox and collapses into an abandoned booth. Nobody bats an eye. The music is too loud, and the situation not quite out of the ordinary enough. The world beats on without him. Kaworu is just watching at this point.

“You’re making me say these things.” Shinji says, repeating it to himself every so often. “You are. You’re doing this to me.”

Kaworu is actually about to step away for a second to grab his coffee when Shinji bursts into tears.

“I can’t believe I’ve let you do this to me for so long.” He says. “And I-I don’t _know_ what else to do. You are so much of my personality. And I hate that. I still love you. What the fuck is wrong with you, Asuka Langley Soryhu? Will you tell me? So I can go home and go to bed?”  


It’s kind of presumed that she didn’t tell him. Shinji goes home on the back of a kind stranger with an apparent penchant for disaster and his friend Shinji Ikari. He carries him piggyback. Only after over the shoulder didn’t work. Being upside down wasn’t good for the vomiting thing, and after Shinji sort of began to black out Kaworu had been forced to get a little handsy with the alcohol poisoning check.

But he was okay. Just out of action for the night. Not forever. Kaowru had seen it before. Everyone has. The problem with vices is that they become the problem _and_ the vice. Like having two illness you didn’t ask for instead of one.

 

At 5:45 AM, the rescue mission roles to a close. The christmas lights are on in the window, and that's how Kaworu identifies it. He just has a hunch. Sad people and drunks always have christmas lights in their windows. It’s sort of one of the rules in life.

He comes over the pavement horizon as the sun is just beginning to stretch shades of gold and red over the sky. Like a soldier. Wounded, physical and beyond it. His eyes are years older than him for only tonight. With the body of innocence, cold and dead but warm and breathing on his back. He has won some and lost more. He’s a hero and he will never know it as well as he ought to.

He carries shinji around the back of the one with the christmas lights in the windows, and sets Shinji carefully down in front of the door. He stands groggily, and not all by himself at first. It’s a process that he rubs his eyes and grumbles throughout.

“How’d you find my house?” His voice is small and raw.

“Address on your arm. Remember?”

“Hell no.” Shinji snorts. “What a night.”

“A true requiem for bohemia.” Kaworu zips up his jacket and goes to knock on the door, admittedly pushing past Shinji to get this all over and done with. “Sorrow and you are hardly strangers.”

“Don’t quote Antigone in my house.” Shinji warns him.

“We’re not in your house. We’re outside of it.” He knocks again, louder this time. The TV is on inside. She must still be up, or at least waking up for work or something. Kaworu does a late double-take. “I wasn’t lying about studying the classical greek arts.”

“Oh yeah?” Shinji narrows his eyebrows. Classical greek arts. One of the only classes that he never once came close to failing. “Do your worst.”

Knocking no more, Kaworu turns around to humor this. When will he get the chance to flex this again, if ever in his life? He’s leaning against the siding of the house, arms tucked together to combat the cold. It’s still so wet outside. And you can see his breath hanging there in the air as he begins, lowering his voice for effect sweet effect.

“ _While Psyche stood on the ridge of the mountain,_ ” He breathes. “- _panting with fear and with eyes full of tears, the gentle Zephyr raised her from the earth and bore her with an easy motion into a flowery dale. By degrees her mind became composed, and she laid herself down on the grassy bank to sleep.”_

Shinji is suddenly very awake, and very aware of the warm swelling in his throat. Kaworu looks up into the sunrise to remember the rest.

“ _When she awoke refreshed with sleep, she looked round and beheld near a pleasant grove of tall and stately trees. She entered it, and in the midst discovered a fountain, sending forth clear and crystal waters, and fast by, a magnificent palace whose august front impressed the spectator that it was not the work of mortal hands, but the happy retreat of some god. Drawn by admiration and wonder, she approached the building and ventured to enter.”_

Shinji tries to say something at first, but swallows the sentence whole. He finds it at the bottom of his chest and tries again.

“What did she find?” He asks. And Kaworu looks at him very straight on, and very realistically.

“You know what she found.” He whispers. “You’ve read it.”

Four times, to be exact. Shinji nods, feeling emotionally assaulted in some way, and lighter than air in another. He’s looking at the ground first, and then Kaworu, and then still Kaworu, and his eyes, and his hair, and the wrinkles around his mouth from where he laughs too much.

“That’s pretty gay, dude.” Shinji says.

“That’s pretty enlightening,” He responds. “Considering i’m gay and all.”

“How’s that treating you?” His poor acquaintance here just kind of shrugs, unsure of the answer to a question that he has never been asked in his life.

“Pretty neat.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.” Kaworu breathes, counting the seconds between Shinji’s blinks and establishing a pattern, just for no reason at all. “I just kind of love men and do laundry and dress better than everyone else. And I’m a better cook.”

“How do you mean?”

“Well-” He begins to say, and unfortunately has to put the story on hold when Shinji falls into the crook of his neck and tries to put their lips together for science or something. For science. And then he’s pushing him off, and when Shinji feels the first rough push he is off like a lightswitch. The fast responding kind. “I just pay more attention to the steps along the way, like- the ingredients and stuff, instead of focusing on the endgame. You know?”

“Yeah, cool.” Shinji doesn’t say anything else because he’s not sure how long Misato has been standing in the open doorway now, but she’s crossing her arms and her eyes are sad.

“Get in here.” She hisses at him. “Now.”

“I’m- ma’am, I was not- I had absolutely no intention-” Kaworu stutters, but she’s already scoffing him off.

“I know you didn’t. Who would?” She pulls her finger out like a weapon and points Shinji inside. “Now.”

“Shinji, I’m sorry man, you are- you are a really cool guy.” Kaworu stumbles away from the porch. “But you are...really not you right now, and I am so totally ready to laugh about this later if you still want to be my friend.”

“Oh my god.” Shinji has never felt more hollow in his tired lifespan. “Oh my god, please go home, thank you but please go home.”

“Shinji, I-”

“Get the hell out of here!” Misato has a broom now, so that’s a thing. She waves it threateningly a few times, like one might do to get rid of a raccoon. It’s 1958, Shinji guesses, and it’s still cool to chase people out of the yard with a broom like we’re fucking cave witches.

“Go on! Get out of here! I’m sure you’re a very nice young man, but go on, scat! Have a safe walk! Sorry about him, but get the hell away from my porch!”

Shinji goes inside without her and it occurs to him that he cannot for the life of him remember what Psyche found in the mountains.

Kaworu leaves the premises and Misato promises not to call the police.


End file.
